NOTE:“Old Norse” and “Old Gaelic” as
used by Fell may be equivalent to a Northern dialect of the Saharan language
as discussed byNyland, andmost
of the inscriptions in this section may also be transcribed with the Ogam/Igbo Dictionary:seeCatherine Acholonu.Also, please see reviewbyRobert
Morritt.

As of April 2011 there have been
few implements found in the Americas that date from the Bronze Age (Please
see Discussion).Nevertheless, there is considerable
evidence of a voyage or voyages of a Bronze Age Scandinavian king, Woden-lithi,
to North America around 1700 B.C. from texts found inscribed in the rocks at Peterborough, Ontario, Canada(Figs. 18 & 19 & MAP), and other North American sites.(Figs. 18 & 19 & MAP), and other sites.These texts, written in Teutonic and Norse tongues, used alphabets
that have survived to the present in remote parts of the world.However, in Europe Roman script became the
predominant alphabet around the time of Christ as part of the general
occupation.They support the belief
that Europeans during the Bronze Age were literate, educated people.Harvard Professor Barry
Fell(1982) has attempted to translate the inscriptions to
about October 2000.Expected
widespread criticism of such new ideas flooded the archeological world (see Comments).Yet by the year 2005 there has emerged a
revolution in American prehistory that may finally remove antiquated biases
and enable concerted efforts at learning and dispelling myths about
colonization in America (please refer to Nyland’s
accounts).The evidence points to the
certainty that European colonists and traders have been visiting or settling
in the Americas for thousands of years, have introduced their scripts,
artifacts, and skills, and have exported abroad American products such as
copper and furs.The voyages occurred
just as the Iron Age was beginning, so that the explorers might have brought
with them implements of iron instead of bronze (see Picture), and most could
have eventually rusted away.

Edo Nyland has examined thePeterborough petroglyphs and especially what Barry Fell considered
Ogam, but he failed to see Ogam writing in it. Nyland considered that Fell
took some isolated characters that look like Ogam, then assigned English
letters to it, but none are connected into a sentence. If one looks at the
Ogam inscriptions that Nyland works with, you see that they form a series of
connected characters, a lineup of them, but that's not what Fell found..
Furthermore,Nyland thought that Fell
was using Gaelic to translate but Gaelic did not exist until about 700 AD.
The early Gnostics used Basque exclusively. Nyland wishes that he could be
more positive about Fell's work. As far as he can see his true strength is in
transliteration, not translation.Indeed, Fell may have believed he was viewing an early form of Ogam
when indeed it was an early form of Norse.Regardless of the terminology, Fell’s translations appear to be
accurate, as indeed Nyland accepted.

According to Fell, Woden-lithi's main
purpose for visiting America was apparently to barter textiles with the Algonquian Indians in return for metallic copper ingots (Fell 1982).He left a detailed record of his visit at Peterborough where he
established a permanent-trading colony.To critics who argued that there was no writing among the
Scandinavians until about the time of Christ, Fell (1982) pointed to two
alphabets as shown in Fig.1.One alphabet,
"ogam
consaine" was employed by the ancient peoples of Ireland and
Scotland (often referred to as Celts—see Celts).They were
recorded and explained in detail by Irish monks during the Middle Ages.A detailed description of this writing was
given in Barry Fell's books America BC
and Saga America.The other alphabet, called "Tifinag", is the special way of
writing of the Tuaregs, a race of Berbers
living in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa.Both ogam consain and Tifinag use only consonants in nearly all
words, leaving the vowels to be inferred, as do writers of Hebrew, Arabic and
other ancient scripts.Sometimes,
where doubt may exist as to the word intended, a vowel sign is added, or a
pictograph, to help recognize the word (Fell 1982).[ Ogam Script
details]

It is apparent from evidence provided
in the following text that Bronze Age Irish and Norsemen colonists in
America showed strong feelings about their pagan gods
and the power that they had over daily events.Therefore, the numerous inscriptions found in America on rocks,
implements and bone regularly connected these gods with whatever the people
were trying to show, whether it be gathering wool from wild sheep or
recounting their travels.With his
wide knowledge about Bronze Age mythology and religions in Europe, Professor
Fell noted close similarities in the American inscriptions.He interpreted these as cultural
extensions from Europe, following colonization by explorers crossing the
Atlantic in ancient times.(Pleases
refer to Figs. 20, 21, 22, 23 & 24for more illustrations to this
section).As of 2005, we have come to
recognize the ancient language as Saharan from
which all other Indo-European languages were derived.

The following text reconsiders the
detailed account by Professor Barry Fell in Bronze Age America, 1982,.with
new knowledge accumulated since its publication.Although Fell’s reference to Celts often includes peoples of
both Ireland and Scotland, I have generally used the word Ancient Irish for
both(Please see Celts).

These alphabets enable an examination
of the famous Bronze Age sites where rock-cut inscriptions are
preserved.One famous site occurs at Hjulatorp, Sweden, the name meaning "Wheel Village."There exist numerous Neolithic or
early Bronze Age rock carvings that
resemble chariot wheels and others that look like disks or globes (Figs.
3).Fell (1982) discussed the significance of
this site as follows:

Examine the fernlike inscription on
the lower part of the rock face, beneath some circular carvings.There is little difficulty in recognizing
this as ogam consain, and that the letters are as shown on Fig 3.They spell K-UI-G-L, which, as all Norse- and German-speaking readers will immediately recognize,
is just an archaic way of spelling the general Teutonic root that means a
ball or globe.Glance now to the
upper right, where, beside the same circular images, we now find a series of
engraved dots that match letters in the Tifinag alphabet.The letters are, as shown in Fig. 4, K-G-L--,
again, just an archaic rendering of the same word, this time in a different
alphabet.There are more of the
Tifinag letters.Look at the chariot
wheels ..." in Fig. 5."Beneath
them are letters that spell W-H-L-A,
obviously an archaic spelling of the Old
Norse<= Saharan?> word for wheel.Farther to the right we find a Tifinag
word spelling K-L.Now the writer of that last word may have
been an ancient Swede, already casting out from his pronunciation of kugl that internal g, for whereas Danes and Germans
retain the internal consonant, the Swedes now spell and pronounce kugl as kula.

But, it may appear, there is not
supposed to be any writing at all on these Bronze Age monuments!Well, that was not Fell’s opinion, and he
suspected thatit would begin to
occur to the reader that perhaps our earlier ideas may have erred on these
matters.Now let us take a look at
another Bronze Age carving, first recorded by Dr. G. Halldin in the 1949
volume of the yearbook published by the Swedish Sjöfartsmuseum.It shows a ship of the characteristic
Bronze Age form, with the keel projecting fore and aft below the upward-turned
bow and stern pieces.Along the upper
and lower borders of the....ship (Fig. 6a) we see two lines of Tifinag letters, and a third line
curves around the lower edge of the rock slab.In the Bronze Age (and also among the Berbers in modern times),
when two or more lines of text occur, they are read as if they were a
continuous "tape:": that is, with each line alternating in
direction, so that no break occurs in the line of symbols.Here we read the top line from left to
right, the next line from right to left.The letters prove to be K-GH
H-W-L.Now take a glance at an
American rock inscription, also depicting ships of the Bronze Age type(Fig.6b).This particular carving, at Peterborough,
Ontario, can be visited easily by Canadians living in that area, As can be
seen, the letters K-GH occur at
the beginning of the first line, too, which also is to be read from the left
to right, just as in the Swedish example.Reference to any Old Norse <= Saharan?>or Old Icelandic dictionary will disclose
that kuggr, often anglicized in
Viking times as cog, is an Old Norse word meaning a
seagoing trading ship.On the Swedish
example the next word, H-WL, can
readily be recognized, since it still occurs in all Norse tongues, as meaning
whale, or, in the older sense, any sea monster or leviathan.Thus the Swedish example is telling us
that the monument is dedicated to "The
seagoing ship Leviathan."As for the Canadian examples, merely note
that kuggr is only one of several Old Norse words for ships
that we find represented by Tifinag letters beside carvings of Bronze Age
ships.

Returning to Sweden, we now visit at Backa, Brastad, another site, considered by Swedish
archaeologists, to be Neolithic (around 2000 BC).The word baca does
not occur in modern speech, but in Old Norse<= Saharan?>it meant, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Old Icelandic,
"a kind of blunt-headed arrow."The rock inscription that occurs at Baca depicts just such a
blunt-headed arrow, together with an image of the sun god and human figure,
apparently dead, plus some letters of the Tifinag alphabet (Fig. 7 ).These, if read from right to left, yield
the words S-L B-K-S, solbakkas, translating as "of the
sun's blunt arrow."The precise
reference may be obscure, but it seems clear enough that the letters are
indeed Tifinag, and that the subject under discussion is indeed the blunt
arrow that is depicted below the letters and that gave its name to the place
where the inscription occurs.

The examples cited so far come from
the eastern parts of Sweden and comprise very simple texts, using only a few
letters of the Tifinag alphabet.If
we transfer our attention to the rock inscriptions found on the southwest
coast of Sweden, immediately adjacent to Oslo Fjord and
along the strip of coast to the north of Göteborg, we
find much more extensive and varied inscriptions at localities in the
Bohuslän region.Here the texts are
longer and more interesting and, in many cases, they show the same obvious
relationship to the accompanying carvings of men, animals, and ships.What have hitherto been incomprehensible
"lines of dots" now assume quite clearly and unmistakably the
character of commentaries in a very ancient kind of Norse language that
was evidently spoken during the Bronze Age.Since there was at that time no differentiation of the ancestors of
the future Angles and Saxons from the
general stock of Teutonic speakers that later gave rise to the tribes that
spread from Denmark to England, herein shall be used the terms Norseand Ancient Norse for the language
that is represented in these Bronze Age inscriptions.it was Fell’s impression that English,
German, and other Teutonic languages, including the Norse or Scandinavian
tongues, may all be traced back to the Bronze Age dialect that is the subject
of this account.

The inscriptions in western Sweden seem to fall broadly into three main
categories.These are (1) short
didactic statements that appear to be school lessons for young scribes, very
much resembling the Irish (noted as Celtic) school inscriptions reported from
British Columbia in Fell’s book Saga
America, (2) prayers for the safety of ships at sea and for victory in
impending attacks upon foes, and (3) narrative material depicting and
identifying important events, such as the pagan festivals with their associated
rituals and entertainments.In
deciphering these Tifinag texts, from which the vowels, of course, are
usually lacking, Fell used as hisreference the known vocabulary of Old Norse and Old
Icelandic.However, in many cases
dialects such as Old English or Old High German could equally well be used as
the reference guide, with the same translation resulting, and with little
more than the substituted vowels to distinguish the various dialects.Since the vowels are lacking we are left
without any certain indication as to which of the Old Teutonic tongues is the
closest to the speech of these ancient Norsemen people, and it is possible
that all are equally related, as was suggested above.But to provide a uniform nominal
vocabulary Fell selected Old Norse or Old Icelandic as the base.

Any literate community has to provide
a means of instructing the young in the arts of reading and writing;
otherwise, the skills would die out.it appears that in Bronze Age times the schoolmasters used much the
same kind of didactic material for their lessons as did teachers in later
ages.The subject matter ranges from
simple identifications of depictions of objects of daily life to more
sophisticated proverbs and adages, each illustrated by appropriate pictorial
carvings.

Fig8illustrates two inscribed petroglyphs from
the Bohuslän district that suggest that they were
intended for younger readers.The
first imparts a moral lesson on cooperation; the second is of the familiar
grade-school type, in which people are related to their daily environment, in
this case two fishermen who are "on the water."Fig.9 shows more of
the same type of illustrated statement, in which a warrior holds his buckler
in such a manner as to show how the word is
spelled.A bull and a cow are
introduced, each illustrating how its name is spelled; and the sun god
carries the image of the sun, thus showing how the letter s(for sol, sun) originated.

Fig.10 could also be used in teaching youngsters, though the
context from which these ship details are taken suggests that it is a record
of a naval episode.The ships' names are
given, sometimes (as in the upper example) with a helpful hieroglyph added--
the vessel is called the Serpent,
and a serpent is shown between the letters that spell the word.

Fig. 11 shows part of an
inscription at Vanlös, Bohuslän, in which a
winding strand of Tifinag letters weaves through a series of carvings of
Bronze Age ships.The decipherment,
as given in the caption, shows that the work was intended as some kind of
charm to enable seagoing cogs to remain together, with a fair wind, and to
arrive at their destination all at the same time.Fig. 12 shows two charms
or prayer inscriptions intended to cause fish to take the hook.The upper illustration has the Tifinag
letters laid out in a vertical column; it is a rebus simulating a fishing
line with a hook at the lower end.Analogous inscriptions in Irish (noted as Celtic) dialects commonly
form rebus arrangements of ogam letters, so we must conclude that texts of
this type were part of the whole Norsemen culture during the Bronze Age and
were by no means confined to Scandinavia.

Figs. 13, 14, 15 & 16 illustrate a portion of a series of petroglyphs that
occur on one rock face at Fossum, Bohuslän, all depicting various aspects of
the events that occurred during the celebration of the Thorri festival, held
during January and February.Fig. 13 shows the symbol
of the festival, a sign made up of reduplicated letters of the name Thorri,
resembling a thunderbolt symbol.There follows a scene in which the trumpeters, the lur-blowers, hold
these curved instruments to their mouths, and an appropriate text tells us
that this began the day's ceremonies.Below, in Fig. 13 we see a scene
from what appears to be a hockey game appropriately labeled "ball
game."Dueling with maces is the
subject of Fig.
14, the competitors each wearing a sword, all as usual in
this period displaying their phalluses.Fig.
15 shows petroglyphs of sorcerers performing feats of
juggling, the balls that they throw into the air being the letters of the
inscription itself.Fig.16 depicts hunting
with the bow and arrow and an archery contest held in connection with the
Thorri festival.Notable in these
texts is the use of ship symbols to provide punning words that suggest the
actual word intended by the consonants or even that replace spelled-out
words.The captions to these figures
explain the points of interest.

With these introductory examples, it
is now appropriate to leave the Swedish scene, where our readers have perhaps
some questions to pose to the archaeologists of Stockholm.As for us here in the Americas, we too
have matters to settle with our own archaeologists.

But the epigraphers, who study
ancient inscriptions, have some explaining to do.How is it that a Berber alphabet can occur in Scandinavian
Bronze Age contexts?Why does an
Irish (noted as Celtic) script also occur there?Why do both scripts (and may others) occur as rock-cut
inscriptions in the Americas?These
are matters that have been the topic of Fell’s earlier books and research
papers.A few brief answers may be
inserted here, for readers new to the subject.

In regard to ogam, it is easy to
demonstrate the untruth of the claim mentioned above that it is a local
London invention dating only from the fourth century AD.If those who make this claim (British
archaeologists) should take the time to visit the numismatic department of
the British Museum they would see examples of the silver coinage of the
Aquitanian Gauls, struck in the second century BC and lettered in ogam
consaine.They would also see Iberian
and Basque imitations of these, lettered in ogam.If they should look at the artifacts excavated from the
Windmill Hill site occupied around 2000 BC by the builders of Stonehenge,
they would see ogam consaine engraved on these, too.

As regards the Tifinag alphabet of
the Berbers, ..... Fell’s thesis was that Tifinag is in fact an Ancient Norse script, and that
it was taken to North Africa, probably in the twelfth century BC, when the
pharaoh Ramesses III repelled an attack by Sea Peoples (who appear (in
his bas-reliefs) to be Norsemen (See Nyland’s account).The invaders took refuge in Libya, and it
is suspected that the Old Norse <= Saharan?>runes went with them, and survived as the
Tifinag.During Fell’s work in North
Africa he met Berbers who had no tradition of the origin but who were
obviously Europoid, with fair hair, blue, gray, or hazel eyes, and typical
European features.

And as for how European skippers
could have reached the Americas in the early Bronze Age, their own spokesman,
King Woden-lithi himself, may be left to handle that question.he does so in the words he had
inscribedon limestone in Canada
3,500 years ago, during the five months he spent in Ontario.And so for why Europe chose to forget
about America, that is a matter primarily for European historians to explain,
but it should be pointed out that the earth's climate became colder at the
end of the Bronze Age, when the north polar icecap came into being [See Climate].Sailing westward
by the northern route became hazardous until the amelioration of climate that
took place just before the onset of the Viking period.

Perhaps, when the study of rock
inscriptions in Scandinavia is pursued more widely, new evidence may be discovered
that could help to fill in some of the missing pieces of the record of humans
upon the high seas.The increasing
frigidity of the North Atlantic as the warm Bronze Age ended would not have
been the only factor that might have tended to discourage transatlantic
trading.

There were also changes occurring in
the pattern of commerce in Europe, as the Bronze Age advanced, and these,
combined with gradual exhaustion of available upper-level deposits of
metallic copper in Canada, probably turned the attention of Scandinavian
skippers more to the south and less to the remote lands across the Atlantic.

By 1200 BC, when the Scandinavian
Bronze Age was reaching its peak, traders from the Carthaginian
settlements in Spain and Tunisia were reaching the Baltic lands.They brought with them another alphabet,
the Iberian, itself a development of the Phoenician way of writing..Scandinavian inscriptions now assumed the
character of commercial documents, engraved on small pieces of bone, written
in the Iberian script, and recording business transactions.It was probably at this epoch that
Scandinavian leaders decided that the time had come to discard the old
Tifinag letters of King Woden-lithi's day and to modernize their business
records by adopting the new Iberian script.So only, the religious inscriptions preserved the Tifinag in the
northern lands.On the southern
shores of the Mediterranean, roving Norsemen raiders also preserved their
Tifinag, which ultimately became the inheritance of the Berber peoples.

The alphabet may not have been the
only bequest these Norsemen made to their successors who settled in the Atlas
Mountains.When Fell was working in
Libya he noticed among Berbers some words still in use that had familiar Norse sound, made
even more recognizable now that we can see how King Woden-lithi would have
written these same words."(see Table I for examples).

On the basis of evidence gained from
translations of Ogam script in North America, Fell (1982) proposed the
following hypothesis:"Some
seventeen centuries before the time of Christ a Norseman king named
Woden-lithi sailed across the Atlantic and entered the St. Lawrence River.He reached the neighborhood of where Toronto now stands, and
established a trading colony with a religious and commercial center at the
place that is now known as Petroglyphs Park, at
Peterborough.His homeland was
Norway, his capital at Ringerike, west of the head of Oslo Fjord.He remained in Canada for five months,
from April to September, trading his cargo of woven material for copper
ingots obtained from the local Algonquians (whom he called Wal, a word cognate with Wales and Welsh and meaning "foreigners.").He left behind an inscription that records
his visits, his religious beliefs, a standard of measures for cloth and
cordage, and an astronomical observatory for determining the Norsemen calendar
year, which began in march, and for determining the dates of the Yule and
pagan Easter festivals.having
provided his colonists with these essentials, he sailed back to Scandinavia
and thereafter disappears into the limbo of unwritten Bronze Age history.The king's inscription gives his Scandinavian
title only and makes no claim to the discovery of the Americas nor to
conquest of territory.Clearly, he
was not the first visitor to the Americas from Europe, for he found that the Ojibwa Algonquians were already acquainted with the ancient
Basque syllabary.When Woden-lithi
set sail for home, an Ojibwa scribe cut a short comment into the rock at the
site, using the ancient Basque script and a form of Algonquian still
comprehensible today, despite the lapse of time (See Nyland’s
account)

Fell (1982) then continued with
evidence supporting such sweeping claims.He suggested, "The primary physical evidence comprises a series
of inscriptions cut in the Tifinag and ogam consaine alphabets, using an
early form of the Norse tongue, scattered around the outer margins of the
petroglyph site at Peterborough [Ontario, Canada] (Fig. 18 & Fig 19).Except for the central sun god and
moon-goddess figures and certain astronomical axes cut across the site, the
numerous inscriptions are the work of later Algonquian artists, who used King
Woden-lithi's inscription as a model for their own, more conspicuous,
carvings.The site has been since
1972 under official government protection, and instructions for reaching it
are given by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources in various guide
booklets and pamphlets available to the general public.Readers of this book will find most helpful
the ministry's book Petroglyphs Provincial
Park, Master Plan; also valuable for its treatment of the Algonquian art
at the site is the work by Joan M. and Romas K. Vastokas entitled
Sacred Art of the Algonkians
(Mansard Press, 1973).The latter
work is meticulous in the accurate portrayal of the inscriptions, in their
present eroded state, though the authors did not then recognize the inscribed
alphabets or record them as such.The
important fact is that professional anthropologists such as the Vastokas team
found and recorded the inscriptions and reported that they must date back to
a period before the historical occupation of the region by the Hurons and later by Iroquois.In other words, the inscriptions could not
be modern features, and must date back to the era of Algonquian occupation,
which came to an en some five centuries ago.

Joan and Romas Vastokas recognized
apparent Scandinavian and Bronze Age features in the art style.They pointed out that the ships depicted
in the inscription are shown in the European manner, with animal figure heads
and stern tailpieces, features totally unknown to Algonquian, or indeed in
any American Indian, art.They, and
other archaeologists, noticed the strange similarities of the central sun-god
figure. and associated motifs to corresponding solar deities of Europe,
especially the Bronze Age petroglyphs of Scandinavia.Other characteristic Scandinavian features
that their photographs and drawings record are such elements of Norsemen
mythology as the maiming of the god of war by the Fenrir wolf....., the
conspicuous short-handled hammer, Mjolnir, of Thunor (Thor of the Norsemen),
and Gungnir, the spear of Woden....., both of which were imitated many times
over by the Algonquian artists who later occupied the site.Thus, the purely objective reports made by
the Vastokases who sought only to record what they discovered, without
attaching any interpretation other than that appropriate for Algonquian art,
have an added value and importance for us now, for they observed the material
as it was uncovered from the soil and placed it on permanent record in their
photographs, charts, and descriptions.As a result of the initial discoveries, the whole site was set aside
as a public part and protected by an enclosure.

Thus, the primary evidence still
exists and is open for public inspection under circumstances that prevent the
possible vandalization of the site.The only disturbing feature is that, since the inscriptions were
exposed to the air, after removal of the covering soil that had protected
them, the action of frost and acid rain has caused a
gradual deterioration of the surface of the
limestone.Unless steps are taken to
impregnate the bedrock with a stabilizer, such as silicone, the precious
record may soon melt away into unreadable markings, as part indeed already
had before the site had been found.

The actual discovery should be noted
here.It occurred on May 12, 1954,
and was made by three geologists, Ernest Craig, Charles Phipps, and Everitt Davis,
in the course of fieldwork on mining claims.The following day, "Nick" Nickels, a photographer-journalist
of the Peterborough Examiner,
visited the site, and so began the first modern records of it.Paul Sweetman of
the University of Toronto undertook the first research at the site in July
1954, recording nearly a hundred petroglyphs.Sweetman's report indicated a possible age as great as 3,500
years or as young as 400 years.His
upper limit, 3,500 years, is in agreement with the epigraphic evidence as
given in this book.Tens of thousands
of visitors now come to the site each year, using the access road and other
facilities that have been erected for their benefit.it has become a major center of
archaeological interest for the whole of North America, and all Americans are
grateful to the Canadian authorities for having seen to it that the ancient
petroglyphs are protected yet open to all visitors.

The Vastokases, like most
archaeologists in North America, felt obliged to explain all American
petroglyphs as being the work of native Amerindian artists.Despite their, and others' perception of
the similarities to Scandinavian petro9glyphs of the Bronze Age, the idea
that any connection might have existed between North America and Scandinavia
in the Bronze Age, some 3,500 years ago, seemed preposterous.So they were faced with remarkable
parallels, yet they elected to explain them as no more than chance
similarities brought about by a shamanistic view of the sky as a kind of sea
on which the sun and the moon sailed their ships to cross the heavens each
day.

In treating the inscriptions in this
way, they were following the example of other distinguished anthropologists
and archaeologists who had investigated North American petroglyphs.The leading researcher during the last
several decades had been Professor Robert Heizer of
the University of California.He was
vehement in his rejection of all theories that America had been visited in
pre-Columbian times by voyagers from Europe, Africa, or elsewhere, and he
chose to view all American petroglyphs as the products of Amerindians.He did take account of age-determination
techniques, such as those dependent on carbon-dating of materials found in
caves where petroglyphs occur and the evidence provided by the oxidation of
rocks, especially in dry climates such as eastern California, Nevada, and
Arizona.These methods enabled Heizer
to set dates of up to five thousand years ago for some petroglyphs.As for me, at the time when the Ontario
petroglyphs were discovered, Fell had just completed a comprehensive
Scandinavian journey and had visited many of the famous inscriptions of
Sweden and Denmark, though he was still a long way from recognizing the
Tifinag alphabet at any Bronze Age petroglyph site beyond the shores of North
Africa.

Fell’s subsequent work on Tifinag led
to the gradual decipherment of the ancient language of Libya and, after
various Libyan scholars visited me at Harvard, Fell was invited to lecture on
the Tifinag inscriptions at the universities of Tripoli and Benghazi.Just before leaving for North Africa in
1977, Fell had received from Otto Devitt the first of
what were to be a continuing series of photographs he made for me of the
petroglyphs at Peterborough.Although
he could see that the site included Tifinag letters, the words they formed
seemed to have no discernible connection with the language of ancient Libya,
and he was forced to put the slides aside while undertaking other
assignments.

In the interim Fell read some of Heizer's reports on the
petroglyphs of eastern California and Nevada, and recognized that they
included Tifinag and Kufi (early Arabic).A particularly striking case is the petroglyph in Owens
Valley, California, that depicts the entire zodiac, in the form it had
before the third century BC, together with a Kufi inscription explaining that
the New Year is determined at the time of the vernal equinox, when the sun
enters the constellation of the Ram.One of Dr. Fell’sformer
Harvard students, Dr. Jon Polansky, was now doing research at Berkeley, and
he made the acquaintance of Professor Heizer and showed him the decipherment
Fell had done on his Owens Valley petroglyphs.Consequently Professor Heizer invited me to visit him; this
came about in May 1979.We became
friends and, putting aside his former opposition to the notion of
pre-Columbian visitors, Bob Heizer now carefully checked each element of the
decipherment and confirmed that Fell had rendered his original published
diagrams correctly tin the version in which In inserted the sound values of
the Kufi signs.We planned a joint
publication, but illness prevented him from accompanying me into the desert
that year.Instead, he arranged for
one of his former Berkeley students, Dr. Christopher
Corson, to take me to some of the inscription areas.Dr. Corson, an archaeologist in the Bureau
of Land Management, ahs the best knowledge of petroglyph sites in northern
California and northwest Nevada.He
led a party that included John Williams, Jon Polansky, and me, together with
Wayne and Betty Struble and their son Peter.Bob Heizer planned to take part in Fell’s next field trip, but to his
great regret he passed away, struck down by the illness that had already
prevented his participation in the 1979 fieldwork.Fell was obliged to publish the Owens Valley zodiac without the
benefit of his contribution, though the illustrations of the paper had been
checked by him for accuracy and had his approval.

Dr. Heizer's contribution to American
petroglyph studies had been immense, and Fell’s colleagues and he knew that a
significant point had been reached when Heizer recognized the true nature of
the Owens Valley zodiac and opened his mind to a new view of American
prehistory in which pre-Columbian visitors and colonists would now play a
role.Heizer, an archeologist and
anthropologist, filled an intermediate position between those archeologists
who devote their research to excavation of ancient sites and epigraphers,
those linguists who give their energies to the decipherment of ancient
inscriptions.

By 1979, the same season in which
Heizer and Fell had begun to influence each other, the epigraphers of Europe
had already begun to analyze by work on ancient inscriptions in America, and
soon authoritative publications began to appear, giving strong support and
conformation.Professor Pennar
Davies, a leading Welsh scholar, and in America, Professor Sanford Etheridge,
editor of Gaeltacht (an
Irish-language publication), had both written in support of Fell’s finding
ogam inscriptions in America.In
Spain, the leading Basque scholar, Dr. Imanol Agiŕe,
advised me that he too confirmed Fell’s reports on Basque inscriptions in
Pennsylvania, dating from about the ninth century before Christ.In 1980 the volume he contributed to the Gran Enciclopedia Vasca (Great Basque
Encyclopedia) contained letter-by-letter analyses of Fell’s papers, and in a
technical paper published in 1982 Agíre acknowledged that his decipherment of
the ancient Basque syllabary was correct.These and other published papers, such as those of the Swiss linguist
Professor Linus Brunner, provided competent
scholarly approval of our American studies on the alphabets and syllabaries
that are represented at the site in Peterborough.Their opinions, therefore, together with the detailed analyses
that they have published, must be taken into account when some
archaeologists, both in America and Britain, attempt to discredit the
research on American inscriptions.The claims of the latter that epigraphers in America are deluded by
forgeries, or even forge the alleged inscriptions themselves, have to be
dismissed as ignorant remarks made without personal knowledge of the scripts
or the language involved, and generally without any knowledge of the sites at
which the inscriptions occur.

From the information given herein it
is obvious that the petroglyphs at Peterborough cannot be forgeries, and that
they are ancient.From the
information given previously and those that follow, it is easy for any person
who so desires to check the statements and conclusions, and as in previous
books that Fell has written.Only by
such methods can we eventually persuade Americans to realize that American
history extends far into the past, and that America and Europe interacted
through trade and cultural contact for over three thousand years before
Columbus made his first voyage.

Since Fell’s first book on ancient
voyages to America, some important advances have been made to archaeological
research bearing out that topic.In
New England James P. Whittall and members of the
Early Sites Research Society have discovered and excavated a site (a disk
barrow) that was first occupied seven thousand years ago.Some of the skeletons show the
characteristics of Europeans, yet their age by carbon dating is at least
1,600 years.One of the skulls
matches closely the skulls of the ancient Irish.These facts have been determined by an anthropologist,
Professor Albert Casey, whose research has been
devoted to skull and bone characteristics of Old World peoples.His computer is programmed to recognize
Old World characteristics in New World skulls not being discovered.The tumuli of northeastern America show
great similarities to those of Europe.The radiocarbon dates indicate similar ranges to time.The artifacts excavated from American
burial sites, sometimes in actual contact with the skeletons of their
presumed former owners, have been discovered in some cases to have
inscriptions carved upon them, in ogam and Basque script; to Dr. William P. Grigsby we owe this observation, based on
his own extensive collections of artifacts from the southeastern states.

We are faced, therefore, with what
amounts to conclusive evidence that the artifacts (including written
inscriptions) of European peoples of the Bronze Age are found at American
archaeological sites, and with these artifacts skeletons are occasionally
found that conform to Europoid criteria.The recognition and confirmation of the inscriptions are due to
epigraphers who have published their findings and who, in most cases, teach
courses in linguistics or epigraphy at reputable universities.Thus, whether or not we can comprehend the
sailing techniques of Bronze Age peoples, the fact seems inescapable that
Bronze Age Europeans reached North America.Fell’s personal view was that the mild climate of the Bronze Age
permitted navigation to take advantage of the westward-flowing currents and
westward-blowing winds of the polar regions, and thus made the natural
northern route to North America much easier to use than is the case today,
when polar ice intrudes and savage weather occurs [See Climate].Fell had sailed
that route and appreciated its discomforts.They would have been much less severe in the Bronze Age, while the
attraction of North America for Scandinavian skippers would have been much
enhanced by the availability of copper in metallic form, at a time when
Europe was demanding copper for bronze alloys on a
larger scale than ever before or since......

Salient aspects of the Bronze Age are
now described by Fell."In
northern Europe bronze weapons and implements first began to replace the
stone artifacts of the Neolithic inhabitants when trade routes to the
Mediterranean lands permitted imports from the south.The change from stone and malleable copper
to the more durable and more valuable bronze equipment is dated to about 2000
BC."

At this time, which marks the opening
of the Bronze Age, the most numerous and conspicuous man-made features of the
landscape were the massive drystone monuments that had been erected during
the last phases of the Neolithic, from about 2200 BC onward.These great monuments, called megaliths (from Greek roots meaning huge stones) have remained an
impressive feature of the European landscape ever since, and today tens of
thousands of tourists visit the megalithic sites every year, to gaze with
wonder at these mysterious works of our ancestors.

When the English
Pilgrims began to settle northeastern North America in the early 1600s
they found that the forests and open hillsides carried similar ancient stone
monuments.Governor John Winthrop (the Younger) of Connecticut had become
during his student years one of the first Fellows of the infant Royal
Society, and after his arrival in America was regarded by the colonists as a
fount of information on all matters to do with natural history and
antiquities.hew wrote papers for the
early volumes of the Philosophical
Transactions (published by the Royal Society in London) and thus drew
attention to the salient features of scientific interest in his new world
across the Atlantic.Among his papers
is found evidence of inquiries from settlers as to what could be the meaning
of the strange stone "forts" they were encountering.it was noted that the Algonquian Indians
did not use stone in their constructions (save for some rare instances), and
the Indians themselves shunned the stone chambers and could throw no light on
their origins.

Toward the close of the nineteenth
century the opinions of a few influential archaeologists in North America
were that no European had set foot in America until the time of Columbus.Since such opinions precluded any
possibility that the stone monuments of new England might be related to the
megalithic monuments of Europe, the entire subject fell out of favor.Americans were sent to Europe to study
Stone Age and Bronze Age archaeology, and few, if any, though to pay
attention to the problems raised by the New England megaliths.So deeply ingrained is this view of the
age long isolation of America that when in 1976 Fell published his reasoned
thoughts on the parallels between American and European archaeological sites,
his book America BC was dismissed
by most archaeologists as ignorant rubbish.In reality, much of Fell’s reasoning was based on a careful comparison
of engraved inscriptions found on the associated stonework, both in European
sites (especially Portugal and Spain) and in American contests.Fell recorded, for example, well-known
Iberian scripts of the late Bronze Age, found on hundreds of rocks in
Pennsylvania, and his decipherments, utilizing Professor David Diringer's
tales in The Alphabet (Hutchinson,
1968).Such works as Resurrección
María de Azukue's Diccionario
Vasco-Español-Frances (Bilbao, 1969) enabled me to recognize and report
Basque gravestones and boundary marker stones, apparently dating from about
the era of 900 BC.

European epigraphers and linguists,
such as the foremost Basque scholars, carried out detailed checks on Fell’s
findings, confirmed most of them, and, as already noted, in the latest volume
of the Gran Enciclopedia Vasca [a
discussion is] now given over to matters raised by these American Basque
inscriptions, and the analysis by Imanol Agiŕe in his Vinculos de la Lengua Vasca gives a
virtual total confirmation of his findings:the inscriptions, in Agíre's opinion, do date from about 900 BC, and
they do carry Basque phrases in the appropriate Iberian alphabets of that
period.These findings have been the
object of much discussion by archaeologists.For a current summary of the subject, reference may be made to the Occasional Publications of the
Epigraphic Society, Volume 9 (1981), where some fifty opinions, pro and con,
are set out.In general, it can be
said in summary that linguists and epigraphers agree that the American
inscriptions are genuine and ancient, and that many of them relate to the
Bronze Age.

Since linguists and eipgraphers
concur that the American inscriptions do include genuine products of Bronze
Age scribes, and that the scripts and languages used show that the scribes
came from European and North African lands, there is no longer any basis for
doubting that the monuments of North America that resemble megaliths are
indeed just that--megaliths.By this
it should be understood monuments produced by colonists from Europe in Bronze
Age times.

Now, a popular book is not the proper
place to review the tedious details of various scripts and various languages
employed and inscribed by these visitors, who came from so many different
lands.Besides, Fell already wrote
about these matters in America BC and
Saga America, as well as in around
a hundred or so technical papers.The
most entertaining and attractive entrance to the subject is through visiting
some of the sites where American megalithic monuments can be seen, and also through
visiting the corresponding sites in Europe where, of course, there is no
dispute at all as to the authorship or antiquity of megaliths.

Visual presentation rather than written descriptions form
the best introduction to the monuments, and in the atlas of photographs that
are presented here.European and
American examples of each of the major categories of megaliths are arranged
in comparable groups of similar structures.

Radiocarbon and amino-acid dating has
only recently been applied to the determination of dates of American
megaliths [as of 1982 here], but analogous features suggesting early European
penetration into North America include the low circular burial mounds that
are called disk
barrows.Already noted
previously the investigation of one of these, presently under way in New
England by James Whittall.it has so
far been learned that Whittall's site was under continuous occupation, at
least for ceremonial purposes, from about 5000 BC (amino-acid date 7200
Before Present), until about 500 BC.Over that span of time a number of burials occurred and, as noted....
these include a Europoid skeleton.Associated stone artifacts resemble tools
of the era called Archaic in
America (8000 to 500 BC), corresponding to the entire span of the Neolithic
and Bronze Age in Europe.Sometime
before, AD 900,m stonework structure was added around the margins of the
barrow.These findings by Whittall
point strongly to European arrivals in North America long before Bronze Age
times.

Other radiocarbon dates show that
some of the megalithic chambers in New England are of later date, one in
Vermont, for example, yielding charcoal from the foundation layer that gave a
carbon date of about AD 200.

As for those megalithic monuments that
contain no artifacts or charcoal, dates can only be guessed at from indirect
evidence.The guesses made in that
way suggest that most of them were probably built during Bronze Age and Iron
Age times, as indeed many of the European megaliths can be shown to postdate
the Neolithic period also.So massive
and enduring are megaliths that, whenever they were built, the affected the
living space of later peoples, and certainly Bronze Age Europeans utilized
the Neolithic megaliths. ........" ”.....further comments will be
restricted to the actual megalithic monuments, merely noting here that the
disk barrow, with its contained female skeletons lying in flexed positions,
is regarded in Europe as a feature of the early Bronze Age and that therefore
it is relevant to note here that similar features occur in New England in
districts where megalithic monuments occur.Fell’s own opinion, of course, remained unaltered; it is that the
megalithic monuments of northeastern North America were used during the
Bronze Age and therefore may have been constructed either shortly before or
during the Bronze Age.

The term dolmen is a Breton word meaning a stone table.it aptly describes many of the smaller
examples of the megalithic monuments that go under this name.Such smaller examples, a meter or less in
height are shown in Figs. 25, 26, 27,28., 29. & 30.As can be seen,
they comprise an upper, horizontal slab of stone, the capstone, which is supported on several vertical slabs, like a
table, with an internal cavity.European archaeologists believe that the central cavity originally
contained a burial and that the entire structure was originally buried in
earth that has subsequently disappeared through erosion.it is known that some examples had partial
earth cover still intact a century or so ago.Such bared burial chambers are often distinguished from other
dolmens under the name cromlech.

Of the examples shown, Figs. 25 & 26 are European, Fig. 25 from Carrazeda,
Portugal, and Fig. 26 from the Orkney Islands.The remaining four examples are all
American.Fig. 27 shows an example at Gay Head, on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; a faintly visible
ogam inscription occurs on one of the stones at the entrance to the small
chamber within....The others, Fig28., Fig 29. & Fig. 30, are all located
at Westport, Massachusetts.Similar ones occur in the Boston area.Nothing is known of any former burial
relics in these small cromlechs."[Please see review of structures in <Megaliths>]

Very much large examples, with massive
capstones and relatively shorter vertical supports, form conspicuous
dolmens.These seem unlikely to have
been covered by earth at any stage.

A collapsed dolmen was found in
Vermont.The finder, John Williams,
also found a remarkable sculpted ax and halberd that are cut into one end of
the squared capstone (detail in Fig. 31)."A similar
occurrence has been reported from an early Bronze Age burial cairn at Nether
Largie North, in Scotland, ax heads being engraved on one end of the capstone
and a halberd with streamers on another upright stone of the same burial
cist.it is difficult to conceive of
any Amerindian carving such devices and, as stated, the Algonquians of the
New England region have no knowledge of the authors of these stone monuments.

The example from Scotland cited above
postdates the Neolithic period, to which megaliths are customarily assigned,
and suggests that dolmens are not restricted to a single period.Still more striking evidence is seen in
examples from France.....The
elaborately carved Tuscan columns that serve as the supports for the massive
capstone indicate that this dolmen cannot antedate the Roman era.Also, dated Roman coins have been found
under dolmens in France, and other evidence proves that they served as sites
for some kind of ceremony even as late as the Middle Ages, when the church
authorities regarded such assemblies s the practice of witchcraft.By analogy, then, there are no grounds for
insisting that dolmens are restricted to the archaeology of the Neolithic
period, as do some British authorities.

The largest of the dolmens utilize
natural boulders, sometimes weighing up to 90 tons, supported precariously,
so it would seem, on the underlying peg stones, yet their duration through
4,000 years shows their builders to have had a fine sense of stable
construction.An example is depicted
in Fig. 33, from Ireland, and
another in Trelleborg, Sweden, is shown in Fig. 34.Corresponding examples from North America
are illustrated in Fig.32, Fig.35, Fig.36 & Fig. 38. , Fig.35 shows the dolmen
at Lynn, Massachusetts, locally known as the Cannon Stone.Fig.32 is an example
from near Lake Lujenda, northern Minnesota,
discovered recently by David Harvey, and the first to
be reported from that state.The
other examples are from Bartlett, New Hampshire (Fig. 36), and North
Salem, New York (Fig.38).

It difficult to distinguish the North
American examples from the European ones and believe that both sets were
produced by ancient builders who shared a common culture.When the evidence of inscriptions is taken
into account, ..... the relationship of the American examples to those of
northern Europe becomes undeniable.

A second category of megaliths is supplied by the
underground stone chambers, and on some of these, too, the American ones
included, inscriptions are found that use European scripts appropriate to the
Bronze Age, as well as later graffiti, which have no bearing on the date of
construction.They fall in several
categories, according to the mode of construction.Some are in the form of rectangular chambers, up to twenty feet
in length by ten feet in width, often with the long axis pointed toward the
sunrise direction for either the equinoxes or for one of the solstices.One at Danbury,
Connecticut, carries engraved on a fallen lintel stone the ancient symbol of
the equinox, a circle divided into equal halves, one half deeply engraved to
represent night, the other left clearly visible; this chamber, as John
Williams and his colleagues proved, faces the sunrise on the equinox days:
that is, it is oriented due east and points to a notch on the horizon within
which the sun appears on the days of the vernal and autumnal equinox.

The mode of construction follows
patterns appropriate to the type of stone naturally available.Where large slabs can be obtained, these are
used as capstones to form the roofing, as in the Danish chambers called Jaettestuer("giants,
salons")Fig.39 shows an example
at Aarhus, Denmark.North American examples include a large chamber at South Woodstock, Vermont (Fig.40).The entrances
commonly have a massive lintel stone supported on either two vertical slabs
(called orthostats), as [one found at Mystery Hill,
North Salem, New Hampshire] or on a drystone vertical column of slabs on
either side (Fig. 41, Mystery Hill).Alternatively, the construction may utilize natural features of the
environment, as at Concord, Massachusetts (Fig. 42), and at Gungywamp, near Groton, Connecticut (Fig.43).The chamber may
be wholly subterranean, as in one of the White River examples in Vermont (Fig.44), or may stand
free, as at Mystery Hill..... [See Fell 1982].In the latter case the details of the wall construction are
visible externally (Fig.45, Vermont) as
drystone and internally (Fig. 46, Mystery Hill),
the latter example showing some degree of trimming of the blocks.The internal chamber is usually
rectangular (Fig.47, South
Woodstock, Vermont), but exceptionally, as in Fig. 46, the chamber may have lateral passages.Some chambers are covered by mounds, as in
the example shown in Fig. 48,, South
Woodstock.Where large capstones are
not available locally, corbelling is utilized to produce a roofing, as in the
chamber at Upton, Massachusetts (Fig. 49).Chambers of the latter type seem to be
related to the similar constructions called fougou in Cornwall, England,
believed to date from the Iron Age and to have been used in and after Roman
times.The function of a fougou is
unknown, but food storage or places of refuge are considered
possibilities.The New England
tradition is that these chambers were built by the colonists as "root
cellars," for storing vegetables.But inquiries disclose that they were already present on some sites at
the time of the arrival of the colonists, who, in any case, found that root
vegetables survive the winter frost well when buried in straw in the soil,
but tend to decay from mold if placed in the so called root cellars.The enormous labor of construction, as
opposed to the simplicity of building a log cabin, denies another legend,
that the colonists built the chambers to live in while they were constructing
their first farmhouses.Chambers are also
found on mountainsides where no farm has ever existed but where a good
astronomical viewpoint is obtained.

Like the dolmens, megalithic
buildings continued to be utilized, and also to be constructed, until Roman
times.Fig.50 and 2-30 depict Pictish broch construction at Baile Chladaich, northwestern
Scotland.The brochs are believed to
be defensive structures made around 100 BC.

Some other distinctive megaliths
occur in both Europe and North America.These include phallic monuments of standing stones, called also dall or menhir....... [They ]
are associated with male fertility.So also the megaliths called men-a-tol
(Cornish "Hole in the stone") or just "holey-stones," are
[associated] with the fertility goddesses.The well-known stone rings and monuments such as Stonehenge
are also a feature of the megalithic industry. ....[These are noted] in connection with
astronomical observatories and calendar regulation.For, although the English archaeologist Glyn
Daniel denies any connection of these structures with astronomy,
competent astronomers, notably the Thoms, father and son, of the Department
of Astronomy, Edinburgh University, and Gerald Hawkins,
Fred Hoyle, and John Carlson in
America have all concluded that an intimate connection exists between these
ring structures and the development of astronomical science." (Please
also see Figs. 37 & 51 ),[Please see review of these structures in
<Megaliths>]

Fell (1982) continues that his
professional work as an oceanographer had taken me to various remote oceanic
islands, and while there he had learned of the existence of unexplained
inscriptions cut in caves or painted in rock shelters.These raised questions as to who had made
the inscriptions and when they had been made.Fell’s first paper on Polynesian rock art has appeared under
the aegis of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1941.His colleagues began to look out for
inscriptions, too, when they know of his interest, and he gradually assembled
a considerable collection of photographs and casts as the years went by.He soon became convinced that Stone Age
humans were by no means an ignorant, land-tied savage.On the contrary, he appeared to him to
have been a resourceful and accomplished mariner, who could cross ocean gaps
between Pacific islands greater than the total span of the Atlantic Ocean.

As oceanography advanced, methods
were developed of sending various ingenious devices down to the ocean floor
to take samples by boring into the muds on the bottom.Since mud accumulates extremely slowly far
away from the effluence of rivers, even just an inch deep in the ocean floor
takes us back to a time of deposition of the mud that amounts to thousands of
years.Also, since bones and shells
of marine animals fall to the bottom, they are preserved there in the mud and
become fossils.This fact led to
Fell’s becoming involved in paleontology, the study of fossils, and before
long Fell was serving as consultant to various geological institutions.One of the skills that Fell had to acquire
was knowledge of anatomy, so that fragmented bones could be reassembled and
identified.Some of the restored
bones that heproduced in this way
became the object of research by specialists, and various museums sought his
aid in these matters.

Consequently when Fell learned by
chance of the existence of hundreds of fragmented human bones taken from
archaeological digs that had yielded artifacts on which he could see delicate
inscriptions written in the Iberian alphabets of about 1000 BC, he naturally
became very interested and inquired whether the bones might be made available
to me for study.They would be the
first human remains we had yet encountered that were directly linked with
gravesites from which readable inscriptions in an ancient European language
were also recovered.Through the good
offices of Dr. William P. Grigsby of the Tennessee
Archaeological Society, he eventually found himself sorting, washing, and
restoring the skulls of the former owners of the inscribed artifacts.

The first
Americans, by which is meant people born and bred in the New World,
certainly descended from migrants who entered North America by the only land
route that links the Americas to the Old World, the now nonexistent land
bridge of the Bering Strait.Whether the first humans,
pithecanthropoids of the species Homo
erectus, ever reached the New World is unknown [Dr. R.
D. Simpson, Callico Dig, CA. expressed a belief to
Dr. Fred Legner in 1998 that Homo erectusmight certainly have reached Southern
California].Their fossils span areas
in Africa and Eurasia that are or were tropical and subtropical (as during
interglacial phases in Europe).Since
it is doubtful whether a suitably warm climate could have occurred in the
latitude of the Bering Strait, especially at times when the sea level was low
enough to enable a land bridge to develop, it is possible that the reason why
no pithecanthropoids have been found in the Americas is because none ever
reached here [see Climate].By the time humans had evolved to the stage represented by the
Neanderthals of Europe, and the Old World generally, periods of low sea level
were still occurring, and it seems evident that the bridge to America was
crossed by humans on one (or many) of those occasions.Fossil humans at the
Neanderthal stage is now known from Brazil, and George Carter's latest
(1980) estimate suggests that a conservative date for the entry of humans
into America might be about 100,000 years ago.How long people like Neanderthals may have survived in the New
World is not known, but their cousins in the Old World were contemporaries of
modern types of humans, at least until about 40,000 BC.

As to what kinds of humans came next
to America, opinions of the various anthropologists who have commented in
recent years seem all to be much the same: that is likely that pygmies were
early entrants, since they once formed an important part of the southern Mongolian population, still linger on in
isolated parts of Malaysia and neighboring territories, and are known by
carbon-dating to range back in time to at least 40,000 BC.Before these latter facts were known,
writers such as Harold Gladwin, E.
A. Hooton and Carelton Coon suggested that there
are traces of former pygmy populations in
America, mainly in the shape of isolated communities of undersized people on
the offshore islands.

"Others, such as the zoologist W. D. Funkhouser, and the physicist W. S.
Webb, of the University of Kentucky, drew attention to the extraordinary
diversity of skull form in the prehistoric burials of Kentucky, and proposed
that several distinct races are represented.Bennett H. Young (1910) had encountered a
living tradition among Kentucky folk that pygmies had once lived in some of
the valleys of tributaries of the Mississippi in that state.But when he tried to track the stories to
their source he concluded that they must have been based on a
misinterpretation of the cist burials.The latter, are small stone-slab burial containers, some three feet in
length, into which the disarticulated bones of the dead were placed.The examples he saw did not disclose pygmy
skeletons.

Fell’s interest in this problem was aroused in 1980.Fell was engaged on reconstructing the
thousands of fragments of crania from sites in east Tennessee, sent to me by
Dr. William P. Grigsby and his colleagues.Among the best of the materials they sent me from 600 burials were
several fragmented but almost complete crania, with jaws, in which the brain
capacity was that of a seven-year-old child (950 cubic cm), yet the teeth
showed from their complete development and severe wear that the skulls were
from middle-aged individuals.Later
Fell received from Dr. Grigsby some complete skulls among which was one
unbroken pygmy skull, with the jaws still attached to the facial bones.

As is often the case in Europe,
prehistoric burial grounds from which these and other skeletons were
recovered by members of the Tennessee Archaeological Society showed from
their associated artifacts that a broad time span is implied, and that
whereas some of the burials had occurred during the Woodland period (ranging
back to about 1000 BC), others had taken place later.From the similar states of preservation of
the bones of both the pygmy types and those of the other races present in the
burials, it appeared that the pygmies were contemporary with the other
races.Fell obtained permission to
sacrifice some of the long bones of the limbs for radiocarbon dating.The result of a carbon-14 determination,
with C-13 correction, made by Geochron Laboratories, Cambridge, on carbon
dioxide recovered from the bone collagen yielded an age of 2,160 years plus
or minus 135 years:that is, they
dated from about the third century BC. (Please see Figs. 52 & 53).

The majority of the other skeletons
conformed to the most common type of Amerindian anatomy, in which the head is
of the rounded (brachycephalic) type, and the jaws project slightly (mesognathous),
the lips therefore being full, as in many Western tribes today.[Please see Fig. 56] This a typical Mongolian condition, and there could be
little doubt that the population was derived from ancient forebears who had
entered the Americas from Asia.Some
of the skulls, however, were of a Europoid type, and reference by Dr. Grigsby
to his very large collections (some 32,000) of stone and bone and pottery
artifacts from the sites had already disclosed to him that inscriptions in
old European scripts were engraved on some of the objects.

It looked, therefore, as if a mixed
population of several races had lived in the east Tennessee area, and in all
probability they would have interbred.No pygmies are known to have survived to modern times in North
America, at least not in the United States or Canada, but it does seem likely
that pygmies may have been among the native peoples encountered by the first
European explorers to come to eastern North America."[The devastating effects of diseases such
as measles and smallpox on Amerindians after 1492 AD and repeated European
invasions, are known to have reduced population numbers by over 85% in many
parts of America].

Before Fell received the skeletal material
he had already become interested in the problem of whether or not pygmies
might have inhabited North America.The ancient European word for pygmy or dwarf is a root based on the
form nan.Thus in ancient Greek it is nanos,
in Basque it is nanu or nano (according to dialect), in Irish
Gaelic it is nan, and modern French
has nain, Spanish enano.This strange unanimity among the various languages of Europe,
not all of them closely related, seemed to suggest that there might once have
been a race of pygmies known to ancient Europeans.The lack of pygmy bones in European archaeological sites seemed
to imply that the inferred pygmies, if they existed at all, may not have been
European pygmies.Yet it seemed
inconceivable that ancient Europeans could have known about the pygmies of
central Africa, of those of the remote highlands of Malaysia and the
Philippines.

What intrigued me still more, and
prompted me to draw attention to the matter in two papers Fell wrote on the
language of the Takhelne tribe of British Columbia, was
that these American Indians also had a tradition of pygmies (or dwarves),
whom they called the Et-nane.Later Fell learned from a colleague that
the Shoshone vocabulary also includes a similar word, whose root is nana- and is defined by the compiler
of the Shoshone Dictionary as
"elf-like people.”

Now, when Fell began to analyze the
anatomical characteristics of the pygmy skulls from Tennessee, he soon
discovered that they matched those of the pygmies of the Philippines, who are
also brachycephalic.[Please see
Figs. 58 & 59] Further, he learned
from the accounts of explorers in Malaysia who had penetrated to areas where
no racial intermixture had occurred that the pure or true-bred pygmy there
has very prognathous jaws, as is the case with the American skulls.These Malaysian and Philippine pygmies are
regarded by archaeologists as remnants of a formerly extensive Mongoloid
pygmy race that once occupied much of southern East Asia.Carter believes that their characters area
still to be recognized in dilute trace form in the occasional frizzy hair,
dark skin, and squat stature observed among southern Chinese.Significantly, perhaps, the best-known
native name of the Oriental pygmies is the Aëta.Perhaps this root
is the origin of the prefix Et-
used by the Takhelne.Whether that be
so or not, it is clear that the pygmies of Tennessee were of Oriental--that
is to say, East Asian--origin; and since pygmies are not maritime people,
they can have reached the Americas only by the land route.

They must once have been more widely
dispersed than our present finds imply.However, since they reached as far east as east Tennessee, and their
bones have been found in association with Europoids and inscribed artifacts
of Europoid type, such as loom weights and pottery stamps, lettered in
ancient Irish (noted as Celtic) and Basque [see Figs. 183, 185, 186, 187 & 189], Fell concluded that
there were in fact meetings of the two races, and that therefore the European
visitors could well have taken back to Europe some account of these
mysterious undersized people.An inscription that Professors Heizer and
Martin Baumhoff had recorded from 1California (Fig.
63), when
deciphered as Ancient Irish ogam, seemed also to suggest that early explorers
had encountered some pygmy race that they considered dangerous.

In addition to skeletal remains, a
number of sculptures, evidently of ancient origin, have been discovered at
varying depths in the soil, some of them depicting people of obvious Europoid
origin, yet all the evidence indicates that these sculptures were created in
America, at an era long before the colonists arrived in modern times.Some representative illustrations (Fig.60, Fig. 61, Fig. 62) may serve to
show their nature and their similarity to ancient European sculpture that has
been attributed to the Gauls.Most
striking is the head of a man, carved in Ancient Irish style, with the
curving nostrils and staring eyes that one encounters in Irish art and
wearing as a chaplet a twig of bog oak leaves and acorns.it seems difficult to regard this as
representing anything other than an Irish priest, or druid.It was found in Searsmont, Maine, a part
of a larger work of which the torso still remains on the site, the head being
now in the museum at Sturbridge, Massachusetts.

Fell believed that these heads and
others like them are truly ancient American artifacts, and that the hands
that carved them are also responsible for the engraved inscriptions in ogam
and other ancient European alphabets, found on artifacts at burial sites and
also cut in rock.

The alphabet used by scribes at
Peterborough, Ontario was detailed by Fell (1982) as follows:"Using Table I, the comparisons of the Tifinag alphabet with the short
inscriptions found in Sweden and Denmark, and supplementing these by the much
more extensive material now recognized in America, it is not difficult to
reconstitute King Woden-lithi's own alphabet
[at Peterborough].It is given in Table 2."

It is now possible for anyone who
cares to do so to visit the site at Peterborough, Ontario, with [the present
information]... in hand, and perhaps a copy of Geir T. Zoega's Dictionary of Old Icelandic (Oxford
University Press, 1910) as an independent check, and to see and read the
inscriptions the king had cut, and thus for the first time ever hear the
words of a Bronze Age language that stands in the direct line of descent of
English and the other Norse tongues.Although
nearly 4,000 years stand between us and King Woden-lithi, we can still
recognize much of his language as a kind of ancient English.It is an eerie feeling to realize that we
are reading, and hence hearing, the voice of the ancient explorers of Canada
whose thoughts now come to us across the space of forty centuries, yet still
with familiar words and expressions that remain a part of the Teutonic
heritage.

This is not the place to instruct
readers in the grammar of Old Norse <= Saharan?>, let alone
the still more obscure grammar of Bronze AgeNorse, but it is
quite within the realm of practical life for visitors, including teachers and
their students, to examine for themselves at least the more conspicuous and
best preserved of Woden-lithi's recorded comments.The diagrams.... will make this task relatively easy.And for those who wish to make independent
checks, or to translate parts of the text that are not included [here] ,
there can be no better guides than Zoega's Dictionary, a grammar of Old Norse such as E. V.
Gordon's (Oxford University Press, 1927), and a camera to record the
inscriptions for more detailed study at home.For many of the words and Anglo-Saxon dictionary will also aid
recognition.

The easiest parts of Woden-lithi's
text are, of course, those where the letters are engraved on the largest
scale, and that therefore have suffered least from the erosion of time and
the elements.One of the clearest
sections is located about 30 feet to the west of the central sun figure.The individual letters are from 20 to 40
cm high, and they form a horizontal band about 5 feet (1.5 m) long.The inscription lies directly beneath the
Fig. of the god of war, Tziw,
and it is in fact a dedication to this god.The god can be recognized from .... Fig. 111 and Fig 112, and by the fact
that he stands beside the Fenrir wolf, which has just bitten off his left
hand.... [see later section].For the
present we will restrict ourselves to the line of dedication, shown in.... Fig 112.With the exception of the ornamental
capital TZ[or TS]
that begins the name of the god, all the letters are easily recognizable from
the table of Woden-lithi's alphabet.... [Table 2].Remember that vowels are nearly always
omitted in all Bronze Age inscriptions except when they occur at the
beginning of a word, or where possible confusion of meaning might result.The line of text of the dedication reads:

w-kh-l-gntz-ww-d-n-l-t-ya

The last two
letters are written in ogam and form a rebus of a ship, on the right, all the
others are in Bronze Age Tifinag.The
meaning of the text is "Image
dedicated sacred to Tziw by Woden-lithi."The individual words are as follows.

W-K,
matching Old English (Anglo-Saxon) wig,
a heathen idol, in this case a bas-relief ground into limestone, depicting
the god.Probably we have to supply
the same vowel, i, to make the
letters w and k pronounceable, g and k are related consonants, both formed
in the throat; the only difference is that g requires the vocal cords to reverberate (as can be felt by
placing the fingers on the throat when uttering the sound of g), while in pronouncing k the vocal cords remain inactive, so
no vibration is felt on the throat.Jakob Grimm, the great German philologist, first showed how pairs of
consonants, such as g and k d and t, b and p, change (mutate) from voiced to
unvoiced if they occur in certain positions in words.Woden-lithi apparently spoke with an
incipient "German" accent, and preferred to use a k at the end of words where we in
English are usually content to retain the ancient g sound.

The next word, rendered by
Woden-lithi's scribe as H-L-GN
means hallowed or, as we would prefer to say in Modern English, dedicated.It is a root that is common to all the
Teutonic languages.Germans, for
example, retain it to this very day as heilig, meaning holy,
which in turn is another Modern English word derived from H-L-GN.In the Scandinavian languages the word survives unchanged, as helgen,
meaning holy or to make holy, and the Anglo-Saxon
form of the word is represented by such old terms as halig (holy), halgan (a
saint), halgung (a consecration or dedication),
with hallow, hallowing, Halloween (All-Saints' Eve) as
surviving English derivatives.Halloween is the night before the first day of the ancient Norsemen
winter (November 1), when ghosts are reputed to roam at large.These spirits could be bought off, by
bribes, from any evil intention during the following year, hence our modern
surviving custom of given token gifts to children dressed as demons and
ghosts.The children of Woden-lithi's
Ontario settlers no doubt carried on the same custom.

The next word is the name of the god
himself, here rendered as TZ-W.This implies a pronunciation similar to
the ancient German name of the god of war, Tziwaz.Our Anglo-Saxon
forebears called him Tiw, and in
the Middle Ages the surviving form of the name, in the word Tuesday, became what we still say
today, for the god of war is still commemorated by having the second day
after the sun god's day named for him.

The last word is the name of King
Woden-lithi himself, and it is written beside a pictograph of a man wearing a
robe and crown, to show the reader that the word is the personal name of a
king.Elsewhere in the various texts
on the site we find the word king spelled out in Tifinag, and it then has the
form konungn, matching Anglo-Saxon cyning, Old Norsekonungr and other similar forms in all
the Teutonic languages.Lithi, here rendered as litya, means "servant," thus
the king's name is "Servant of
Woden."Woden was the king
of the Aesir or sky gods.

"The dedication to Tziw illustrates
the way in which we can use dictionaries of Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse, as well as
modern English dictionaries that give the old roots (such as the OED or the American Heritage), not only as a
guide to understanding what Woden-lithi is saying, but also as a means of
guessing approximately what his language-- our ancestors' language-- actually
must have sounded like.

It is not needful here to continue
treating in detail the rest of the numerous texts that lie about the site at
Peterborough and at other places such as the sites along the Milk River,
Alberta, or in Coral Gardens, Wyoming.Readers can devise their own philological checks, if these interest
them, or ignore the subject if they are more interested in other
aspects......." [This discussion
is merely to show how to approach the ancient inscriptions].[Please refer now to Figs. 65, 66, 67, 68, 69 & 70].

Now that we have seen that the
alphabet really does give us the means of reading the various texts that King
Woden-lithi had engraved at the Peterborough site, when he selected it for
the sacred center of his colony, following are some comments on the origin of
this alphabet.

It is essentially the same alphabet
as that used by the Tuareg Berbers.A
possible reason for this surprising circumstance is suggested [later]."However, none of the scholars who have
worked on Tifinag inscriptions in North Africa could ever understand the
relationship between the Tifinag alphabet and the Berber language.it has now become clear that there is no
relationship.Tifinag is not a Berber invention-- instead it is
Norse-- and that
changes the whole problem.

The decipherment of any ancient and
unknown inscription requires first that the alphabet in which it is written
must be solved.Various methods can
be used to achieve this first essential.In the case of Woden-lithi's inscription Fell found the solution
relatively easy, for he had previously traveled widely in the Scandinavian
countries, where shorter but similar inscriptions occur on Bronze Age
monuments, and he had also carried out research on the ancient scripts of
North Africa, including the Tifinag of the Tuaregs.The Tuaregs had preserved their unique system of writing since
time immemorial, and its origin was unknown, though all epigraphers,
including me, supposed it to have been their own invention.

Four thousand years ago the ancestors
of the present-day peoples who speak Teutonic languages were all grouped
together in Scandinavia, in parts of Germany, and along the Baltic coasts.They had not yet differentiated into
Germans, English or Scandinavian, so we can refer to them collectively as
Norsemen.Their descendants today not
only live in northern Europe but also have spread across the world.Most people in North America now speak a
tongue directly descended from the ancient Norsemen of the Bronze Age.

Although short inscriptions in the Ancient Norse alphabet have
recently been recognized in Scandinavia, that discovery stemmed from the more
significant one of Ancient Norse engraved on North American rock.Thus North America has now become
custodian of the oldest and most precious of the ancient records of the
Norsemen peoples, and to Canada is assigned the responsibility of preserving
them intact, and the thanks of millions of people must go to the geologists,
surveyors, and archaeologists who uncovered the main site and placed it under
the protection of the local government.

Our ancestors of the Bronze Age
inherited some of the signs of their alphabet from their Neolithic
predecessors, who also spoke a Norse tongue and used a number of
signs.Thus the following signs were
already known in northern Europe before the Bronze Age, and we now know that
they give us the sounds shown in Table 2.

As is quite obvious, these are
hieroglyphs in which the signs depict recognizable objects, and the sound
they stand for is that of the first letter in the name of the object.Thus, the crescent that is m is obviously the first letter of mán, the older form of our modern
English moon.Similarly the circular sign r, or hr, is the first letter of the word hringr, meaning our modern word ring.So also the circle
with a dot in the center, s, is the
first letter of sol and of sunu, the two Ancient Norse names of the
sun.The b symbol is clearly the Old Norsebuklr, the circular shield with a
leather arm-strap, which is still called a buckler in modern English.These four signs, with the indicated sound values, were needed by the
Neolithic wizards to indicate certain words that mean magic (bur- in Proto-Norse), sailing ship
(also bur-, though a different
root), and the combinations of these two words with signs for the sun and
moon, both of which were viewed as celestial gods that sailed their sun ship
and moon ship by magic across the heavens.Simple statements of this kind can now be read, by sound as well as by
pictograph, in the Neolithic engravings on rock in Scandinavia and also in
North America, as far west as California.

The German philologist Jakob Grimm traveled among the village communities of
Germany and the Baltic lands 150 years ago, and discovered old words such as
those have been mentioned.He used
his findings to develop a forecast of modern theories on how language evolves
through time.He also recorded the
old names of the constellations.This
is fortunate for us, for when we look at the deciphered Norse alphabet of the
Bronze Age we can now recognize more of the origins of the alphabet.For just as the letter s and m reflect the form of the sun and the crescent moon, so also we
now perceive that the dots that make up other letters, in a kind of Braille
system, are really the constellations.

Thus, just as the ancient Irish
(noted as Celts) gazed at their fingers and invented a writing system called ogam based on the varying combinations
of five strokes above, below, and across a central writing axis, so also the
ancient Norsemen people gazed instead at the sky and saw their letters writ
large upon the face of heaven.No
doubt they said their script was divine, sent from the sky by the sky god
Woden (Odin), lord of magic and of runes, the secret writing of the
magicians.As this word runes has already been applied to
later types of writing developed by the Norsemen after the Iron Age, we
cannot use it without some qualification for our Bronze Age alphabet, to
which it undoubtedly was originally applied.So we have to compromise and call the oldest writing of the Norsemen
peoples, Bronze Age Runes.

There remain a number of other letters that seem to be formed
from more commonplace objects of everyday life in ancient times. Table 2, with Fell’s
suggestions as to these origins, explains itself.

In Fell’s popular books on North
American inscriptions he was faced with the difficulty of trying to explain
to an English-speaking public the meaning and language of texts engraved in
tongues so remotely different from English that it made the tasks both of
writing the books and of reading them (as many correspondents have told me)
decidedly difficult.

Now, thanks to King Woden-lithi,
these problems all vanish.he spoke
and wrote a language that resounds down the centuries with the age-old
familiar tones of all the Norse tongues.We
speakers of English, as well as our cousins in Europe who speak related
languages, can all recognize many of the words that Woden-lithi and his
Ontario colonists spoke and wrote here seventeen centuries before Julius
Caesar first encountered the Norsemen tribes of the Rhineland.

Although Woden-lithi's site at
Peterborough is the first recognizable Norsemen Bronze Age site to be
discovered in America, it now appears that there were other visitors from the
Norsemen world of that era.For some
years a puzzling inscription has been known from little Crow Island, near
Deer Isle, Maine, but it could not be deciphered, nor was the script
recognized.It is shown in Fig. 72 and in Fig.73 , a provisional
reading is given, which suggests that some voyager from Scandinavia,
seemingly named Hako or Haakon, visited Maine at a time when the Bronze Age
runes were still in use.[= Ey
vik hvi nokkvi leya a vika= "A sheltered island, where ships may lie in a harbor.Haakon brought his cog here."]
This inscription greatly resembles the script called bead ogam, but the resultant text, if it were read as bead ogam,
is gibberish, whereas if we treat it as Tifinag script, a Norse text, although
rather obscure, emerges.The lack of
associated pictographs or hieroglyphs increases the difficulty of reading the
signs.

To the discerning eye the solar
observatory that King Woden-lithi established at his trading center near
Peterborough is one of the wonders of American archaeology.So surprising do his knowledge of the
constellations and his understanding of the motions of the sun through the
signs of the zodiac appear that at first it seems impossible that the site
could be ancient.it is more like
what one might expect to have been constructed during the early Middle
Ages.However, consideration of what
has been discovered about the growth of astronomy shows that it is not at all
impossible for Woden-lithi to have known what he did know and yet have lived
in an epoch 3,5000 years before our own.

Until about a century ago, all that
we knew about ancient astronomy was what the Greeks and Romans had
written.It was supposed that the
Greeks had named the constellations, and that therefore man's knowledge of
the stars as mapped in the constellations could not be older than about 2,700
or 2,800 years.For some of the
constellations, and their roles in setting the time of year for plowing,
sowing and reaping, are mentioned by name in the works of Hesiod, the first
Greek writer to refer to them, who lived about 800 BC.

Then an unexpected discovery was
made.Archaeologists in the Middle
East began to uncover tablets of stone in which clear reference was made to
constellations, some of them recognizably the same as those we know today,
yet the age of the records extended many centuries earlier, into a time
antecedent to the Greek civilization.

An English astronomer, Richard Proctor, devised an ingenious method of
finding out when the constellations first received their names.He plotted on a chart all the
constellations known to the ancients.He then examined the area in the sky, over the Southern Hemisphere, in
which no constellations had been recorded until modern astronomers named
them, because the ancient astronomers had not explored the Southern
Hemisphere.He found that this
southern blank area has its center, not at the southern celestial pole, as
one might expect, but in quire a different place:a point in the southern sky some 25 degrees to one side of the
South Pole.When he realized that
this center must once have been the pole, at the time when the constellations
were named, he then attacked the related question, the known motions of the
poles as the earth's axis has slowly wobbled like that of a spinning
top.He found that the ancient
position of the poles he had discovered, for the time when constellations
were named, corresponded to a direction of the earth's axis that was correct
4,000 years ago.Thus, the
constellations must have been named some 2,000 years before the time of
Christ.it was then discovered that
the description of some features of the sun's motion in the sky, given by a
Greek astronomer names Eudoxus, could not possibly have been true at the time
when Eudoxus wrote, but would have been correct had he been quoting from
sources dating back to 2000 BC.The
position of the sun at the time of the vernal equinox (in March) was recorded
by these early writers as lying in the zodiacal constellation of the
Bull.But in classical times, when
Eudoxus wrote, the vernal equinox occurred when the sun is in the
constellation of the Ram, some 30 degrees away.

What this means is that when the
Norsemen farmers first learned the arts of sowing seed by the calendar, and
could thereby be sure of seeing the seed sprout instead of rotting in the
ground.Such would have occurred if
it were not sown at the correct time.This phase of social history in the northern lands matched the rise of
astronomy, about 2000 BC.Evidently
the astronomical skills passed along the same trade routs as did the trade
goods themselves:from the Danube and
the Rhine there spread outward and northward into Germany, and then Scandinavia,
a knowledge of the constellations and the motion of the sun through
them.Observatories would be
established to watch for the equinoctial rising of the sun and for other
significant astronomical events that could be used to keep the calendar
correct and functional.

Hence it was one of the concerns of
Woden-lithi in America to ensure that his colonists were provided with a
practical means of observing the sky and the heavenly bodies, so that they
could have always a reliable farmers' calendar.Certain religious festivals were also regulated by the
calendar, such as the spring (New Year) festival in March, and the midwinter
or Yule festival held in December.

To establish his observatory,
Woden-lithi had first to determine the position of the north-south meridian
of his site.He probably used the
following method.First, he selected
a central observing point, and engraved two concentric circles into the rock
(thus forming the head and central "eye" of what later became the
main sun-god image).An assistant
then held a vertical rod, centered in the marker circles, on a clear day as
the sun approached its noon altitude.The shadow cast by the vertical rod would grow shorter as the sun rose
higher, and then would begin to lengthen again as the sun passed the highest
elevation at noon, and commenced to decline.The direction of the shadow at its shortest length was marked on the
rock.Checks on subsequent days would
establish this shadow line more precisely.The marked lines except for minor errors due to variations in the
velocity of the earth's motion (for which no correction could be made in
those early days), would be the meridian, running north and south.

Woden-lithi could now lay out the cardinal
directions, north, south, east, and west, by making a right-angle
intersection with the meridian line, to give the east-west axis (see Fig. 74).Instead of cutting lines for these
cardinal axes, however, he made sighting points at their extremities by
cutting a sunburst figure, as shown.

The sighting sunburst for due east he
then identified by an inscription lettered in ogam consaine, shown on the
right side of Fig. 74.In his Old
Norse language <= Saharan?>it reads M-DO-S-D-N (Old Norsemotosten,
facing east).The illustration gives
a plan view to the scale shown, so the visitor can readily identify these
features at the site.

At this stage in his work Woden-lithi
had now provided his colonists with the fundamental tool for regulating their
calendar, for, every year at the vernal equinox in March, when the ancient
year began for all civilized peoples, an observer standing on the site would
see the sun rise at a point on the horizon lying on the line of sight from
the "eye" of the central sun-god figure. to the eastern sunburst
figure.On that occasion each year
the Norsemen peoples held a festival, named for the goddess of the dawn, Eostre.The name survives in our modern language as Easter,
now of course linked with a Christian festival to which the old pagan name
has been attached.

Ancient peoples also celebrated
another festival on the shortest day of the year, called by the Norsemen
nations Yule; this pagan festival
is nowadays lined with the Christian festival of Christmas, still called Yule
(spelled Jul) in Scandinavian
countries.Woden-lithi therefore
wished to provide his colonists with a means of determining the day on which
the Yule feast should be held, for to the ancient peoples it was a great day
of celebration, marking the end of the sun's winter decline and the promise
of a new and warmer season ahead.

Woden-lithi's inscriptions tell us
that he remained in Canada only for five months and that he returned to his
home in Scandinavia in October.hence
he could not observe the direction in which the sunrise would be observed on
the actual day of midwinter, for he was no longer in Canada.So apparently he estimated the direction,
drawing on his experience in Scandinavia.In southern Norway the precise direction of sunrise on Midwinter Day
varies quite considerably, for at the latitudes spanned by the interval
between the southern end of the Skagerrak (at about 56 deg. N) and the head
of Oslo Fjord (at 60 deg. N), the astronomical equation that determines the
sunrise direction gives solutions that range over a span of some seven
degrees between the extreme values.Consequently, since Woden-lithi probably did not have any clear
conception of latitude, and would have to judge the situation in terms of his
notions of the variations seen in Norway itself and neighboring Sweden, he
would probably conclude that the Peterborough site seemed to be comparable
with southernmost Scandinavia.For
example, he would have noticed that the midday sun stood higher in the sky at
midsummer at Peterborough (when he was present to observe) than it did in his
homeland, and he would also know that the noonday sun stands higher in the southern
Sweden than it does near Oslo on any given day.From such knowledge he perhaps estimated the likely sunrise
direction for Midwinter Day, and cut his estimated axis into the rock at the
site.This he marked by another
sun-god figure (which is labeled Solstice
on Fig. 74).Woden-lithi himself had a label carved
into the rock beside this figure.As
can be seen from the illustration, it spells W-LH-K.Hoki was the Ancient Norse name of the
midwinter festival: the word still survives today in the Scotch word Hogmanay, the traditional name of the Scottish midwinter
holiday, now applied to the New Year holiday.The letters W-L
evidently represent the hvil of Old Norse <= Saharan?>, meaning a time of rest, a holiday from
work.The importance of this Hoki holiday can be judged from the
large scale in which the letters have been engraved at the site.It was, no doubt, the time of the major
national festival for all Norsemen peoples, and Woden-lithi undoubtedly
intended that the old traditions be kept alive in his trading colony in the
New World.

As we examine the site today, where
these ancient instructions for regulating the calendar year and its festivals
still survive, it is clear that whereas the critical date for starting the
year and determining the correct time of planting seed, the equinox, is
accurately set out, the same is not true of the Hoki axis.it
overestimates the southern declination of the sun by several degrees.Woden-lithi's colonists would find that
the midwinter sunrise did not, in fact, ever range quite so far south as the
king had predicted, and that the sunrise point would begin to return toward
the eastern horizon before ever reaching the southeastern azimuth to which
Woden-lithi's Hoki axis now
points.Nonetheless the general tenor
of the matter would be clear enough, and since most years the midwinter
sunrise tends to occur in banks of low-lying cloud, the error was probably
known to only a few of the more meticulous observers.

Those of us who have made the
somewhat hazardous journey to observe the midwinter sunrise at sites in the
Green Mountains [Vermont?] that are oriented for this purpose, have
discovered the whole area under the deepest snowdrifts.The same circumstance, no doubt, is true
of Woden-lithi's site: the whole inscription area, with all the astronomical
axes, would usually lie buried under deep snow, hence invisible and useless
for making astronomical determinations of the festival dates.

An explanation for these conflicts of
data is to be sought in our developing knowledge of climatic change.In Woden-lithi's time the whole earth had
a much milder climate than it did one thousand years later [see Climate].The site at Peterborough may well have
been prairie rather than dense needle-forest, as it is a present.Open views of the distant horizon could be
had, the actual sunrise could be observed, and because of the milder climate,
the snow, if present at all, could be cleared away from the site.

Also, as the climate deteriorated
with the progress of time, the people here at the end of the Bronze Age,
around 800 BC, began to find the snow an increasing impediment to their
calendar regulation [see Climate] .They were forced to construct a new type
of observatory, one that could retain its major astronomical axes in a
visible and usable state despite the snow accumulations.These new observatories are probably where
the observers could be housed comfortably below ground, with a large living
space that could be heated by fire, and with the axis of the entire chamber
directed toward the midwinter-sunrise azimuth on the distant horizon, so that
the calendar observation could be made simply by sighting from the inner end
of the chamber, through the entrance doorway, which was built so as to face
the midwinter sunrise point.Once
this practice had been adopted to overcome the ferocity of the winters,
reaching its extremes of discomfort as the Iron Age began, the advantages of
astronomically oriented chambers would be realized, and soon all
observatories, whether based on summer, equinoctial, or winter sunrise
directions, would eventually be constructed as comfortable chambers.The old open-air sites, like that of
Woden-lithi, would be abandoned forever, became buried under drifting soil
and leaves and then turf (as happened at Peterborough), or would be eroded
away by the elements till nothing readable remained, and thus disappear
altogether.

To return to Woden-lithi's site, it
is of interest to note that he adopted the ancient Semitic method of naming the south direction.The Semitic peoples regarded east as the
main map direction.Facing east they
would name the cardinal points on either side, so that north became
"left-hand" and south became "right-hand."On Woden-lithi's site w find that he has
engraved in very large Tifinag letters the word H-GH-R at the southern extremity of the platform, where he as cut
yet another sunburst figure.The word
intended is Old Norsehogr, meaning "right-hand."The word is still sued today in Sweden
where, if you are given street directions in Stockholm or Lund, you are sure
to be told to take such and such a turn till
högra, "to the right."The Danes say hFjre, but we who speak English seem to have lost the word, and
replaced it by another root.The Old Norse <= Saharan?>words for south (sudhra) and
north (nord) are nowhere to be
found on Woden-lithi's site, so perhaps they had not yet come into use.

Now, since we find Woden-lithi using
the Semitic (Mesopotamian) methods of naming directions by reference to the right
and left when facing east, and since east is the only direction that he
actually calls by its special name, east (osten
in his dialect), it is not surprising that we should find Woden-lithi in
possession of so much information on the Babylonian maps of the heavens, as
designated in the form of the named constellations.

The first hint we encounter on the
observatory site that the stars were already grouped into constellations in
Woden-lithi's day is given by the northern end of his meridian (see Fig.
74).Here we find an inscription in Tifinag that reads W-K-NH-LA-GH, and it is evidently to read as Old NorseVagn
hjul aka, "The
wagon-wheel drives."Our
Norsemen ancestors knew the constellation near the present north celestial
pole that we in America call the Big Dipper today, and which Europeans often
call the Plow or Wain, as the Wagon.it was supposed to be an ox wagon (that is, the ancient chariot, before
horses had been tamed) and was said to be driven by the god Odin, the Woden
of our colonists.In Woden-lithi's
day the north celestial pole was marked by the star Thuban, in the
constellation Draco; nowadays it lies some 25 degrees away from the
pole.The Wagon was conceived as
wheeling around and around the Pole Star.The wheeling motion, of course, is caused by the rotation of the
earth, but in Woden-lithi's day it was conceived as a rotation of the sky
itself.We have other hints.... about
star groups known by name to the peoples of the north in Woden-lithi's
time:the four stars that form the
square of Pegasus (Called Hestemerki,
"horse-sign," by the Ancient Norsemen) seem to be the basis of the
four dots that make the Tifinag letter h;
and the w-shaped group of stars that form Cassiopeia, called Yorsla by the ancient Scandinavians,
seem to be the origin of the w-shaped letter that gives the sound of Y.

To the southwest of Woden-lithi's
observatory lies an area of limestone where the constellations of the
Norsemen zodiac have been engraved.These are shown in Fig. 75 and Fig. 76.We note that some of the Babylonian
constellations bear replacement names in the Woden-lithi version.The ram (Aries) is obviously a bear, and
some broken letters beside the image of the animal seem to spell in Tifinag
the word B-R-N, a root that
appears in all Norse tongues in one form or another, as bjorn in Scandinavian,
and bruin in English.The next sign, the Bull (Taurus) of
classical astronomy, is drawn as a moose; it is labeled in Tifinag L-GN, Old
Norseelgen, the elk.The Lion (Leo), though labeled L-N (Old Norseleon),
seems to have been carved by an artist who had in mind a lynx.The Crab (Cancer) looks like a lobster,
and it is drawn as if it lies at the feet of the Twins (Gemini), here
identified as M-TTH-W-L-N-GN (Old Norsematig-tvillingr,
"the mighty twins").

The significance to Woden-lithi's
people of the zodiac was that it provided a means of describing the annual
path of the sun through the heavens.The sun spends about one month in each of twelve constellations, which
together form the so-called zodiac (a word meaning, "girdle of animals").The vernal equinox, the start of the
ancient Norsemen year, occurs at the time when the sun is located in the
zodiacal sign for that equinox.Two
thousand years before Christ, when, as we have seen, the constellations
received their names, the sun occupied the Bull (the elk in Woden-lithi's
zodiac).Around 1700 BC the slow
wobble of the earth's axis (called the procession of the equinoxes) caused
the vernal equinox position to move out of the Bull into the neighboring
sign, Aries (in Woden-lithi's terminology, the bear).In Woden-lithi's zodiac map he shows the
situation in just that way.The word W-GN (Old Norsevaegn,
a balance) signifies the "balance
of night and day," and is set opposite the space between Taurus and
Aries.In addition, as can be seen on
the right-hand side of Fig. 75, the
sun is shown entering the W-R-M zone of the zodiac at that point.The word intended is simply our word warm,
Old Norse, varm,
meaning summer.On the part of the zodiac corresponding to
the sun's positions during the cold months the engraver has written the
letters W-N-T, our word winter,
Old Norsevintr.All the indications are, then, that
Woden-lithi used a chart of the sky that was appropriate in 1700 BC.Since his writing system and the style of
his inscriptions match so well the inscriptions that Scandinavian
archaeologists declare to belong to the early Bronze Age, we may assume that
Woden-lithi did in fact live around that time.Hence, until evidence is found to the contrary, Fell believed
that we have to date his visit to America as having occurred around 1700 BC.

There are other indications that this
is a reasonable estimate.Some
archaeologists who have investigated the site have suggested a possible age
of 3,500 years, based on the similarity of the art style to that of Europe
3,500 years ago.At a neighboring
site in Ontario where a thousand or so copper artifacts were excavated,
radiocarbon dating indicated occupation a thousand years before the time
proposed for Woden-lithi;, that is, around 3000 BC.And some of the radiocarbon dates from the Lake Superior copper
mines indicate that the mines were worked between about 3000 and 2000
BC.All these data suggest that the
copper-mining industry was already an old established activity in Canada long
before Woden-lithi came to trade for copper.

Circles of Stone

Yet another form of calendar site has
come under investigation in recent years: the circles of standing stones that
occur in large numbers in Europe [e,g., Fig. 80] and also span
the entire continent of North America from New England to California.A variant form in America, especially in
western Canada and the adjacent United States territories, such as Wyoming,
is the stone circles with radial lines of boulder forming spokes to the outer
rim, hence the name Medicine Wheel.In some cases it is believed that the
spokes are oriented toward points on the horizon that were formerly the
positions of the rising or setting of conspicuous stars, which could be used
to mark the seasons.These star-rise
and star-set positions can be calculated for particular epochs in the past,
making use of the known equations that describe the motions of the earth's
axis.

One of the best-known sites is
Mystery Hill at North Salem, New Hampshire.....Apart from the numerous stone chambers on the site there is
also a stone circle.The native
forest has encroached upon the circle, like many others now becoming known,,
but radial avenues have been cleared to permit visitors to sight the major
standing stones from the central observation platform.As the diagram (Fig.
79) showed, there are five principal standing
stones, four of which are still standing erect.The fifth has fallen over.One stone marks the meridian and lies due north of the central
observation point.The other four
mark the sunrise and sunset points on the horizon for the midsummer and midwinter
solstices.On account of persistent
distant cloudbanks on the horizon the actual moment of contact of the rim of
the sun is often invisible for, as the moment when the ball of the sun is
about to reach the marker stone, it vanishes into mist.However, about once every eight or ten
years a totally clear sunset or sunrise can be expected, and on such an
occasion the event is truly impressive.On the diagram (Fig.79), in which
Osborn Stone assisted by reading the exact azimuths from his transit
telescope, the observed angles are those shown; their deviation from the
theoretical calculated values is only of the order of minutes of arc.It is obvious that the site is an ancient
astronomical observatory for the regulation of the calendar, whatever else it
may have been.To judge by the modern
solstice ceremonies of Amerindian tribes, one may assume that much religious
import was also attributed to the celestial phenomena by the ancient peoples
who would assemble at the site to participate.At Mystery Hill the major significance seems to have been the
summer and winter solstices, and regulation of the calendar by the vernal and
autumnal equinoxes does not seem to have been an important part of the
purpose of the ritual.

There are also many sites, as yet
little known or wholly unrecorded, where a dozen or so natural boulders form
ring-shaped structures.They vary
from small circles, such as one that occurs at Gungywamp near Groton,
Connecticut, to rings of more massive boulders, up to 15 meters in diameter
that would have involved considerable labor in assembling the giant stones in
this manner.One photographed by
Jerry McMillan in the Santa Cruz
Mountains, California, is shown in the photograph in Fig. 79b & Fig
79c. An approximate plan of the thirteen stones forming it is
seen in Fig.78.These rings seem
to have been places of assembly for religious purposes; whether they also
served as astronomical observatories (as seems very probable) remains yet to
be proven.Jerry McMillan and Christopher Caswell discovered and photographed
old engraved markings on two of the stones; these have not yet been
deciphered but they seem to record angles of sight.

Some of the smaller rings of stones
that are found in the Sierras and in Montana do not seem to me to be calendar
sites.They remind me of the old shielingsof the
Scottish Highlands.A shieling was a
place on the open mountainside where the young women of a clan would gather
in spring, when the herds ere in flow, to make cheeses and other milk
products.They slept in the open, in
shelters provided by such rings of stones, which remain today as witness to a
way of life that has vanished from Scotland.It was still practiced a century ago, and when Fell was a student in
Scotland in the 1930s he met aged women who had participated in the shieling
and who had a stock of folklore to relate on the subject (The Devil himself
being one of the personages liable to frequent the shielings, on the watch
for any careless maiden who might not have said the necessary protetective
charms).

Religon During the Bronze Age

Based on a translation of
inscriptions in America, Fell (1982) attempts to provide an overview of
American Bronze Age peoples' religion:

As no Norse inscriptions
older than the Iron Age [had been deciphered before publication of... [Fell's
1982 book], King Woden-lithi's commentary on his gods is not only the first
information we have had on the matter, but it is unique.The era in which he lived, calculated from
the position of the vernal equinox on his zodiac as about 1700 BC, is
regarded as early Bronze Age in Britain, but in Scandinavia, where metals
were imported, the Neolithic continued longer, and Woden-lithi would be
regarded as living in the transitional time between the end of the Stone Age
and the beginning of the Bronze Age, a period, often called Chalcolithic, when copper was employed.

Archaeologists and mythologists have
concluded from a study of the carvings left by northern European peoples that
sun worship was the religion practiced at this transitional phase and that it
continued well into the Bronze Age.Their inferences are totally confirmed by Woden-lithi's inscription.

"It is obvious that sun worship
was the vogue, as the sun figure is placed at the center of Woden-lithi's
sacred site, is drawn on a larger scale than the other figures, save only
that of the moon goddess, and the lettering beside each of these deities is
much larger than the other parts of the text (Please see Figs. 81, 82 & 83).

The great festivals of the Norsemen
year in Woden-lithi's day were, as noted previously, those of Yule and of
Eostre.At these times, as the
inscription tells us, there was feasting and drinking, and men dressed up as
comic figures called Yule-men.Their costume suggested the diagonals that
mark the solstice and equinox lines on an azimuth plate recording the
greatest and least excursions of the sun northward in the course of a
year.Some of the actors wore horns,
other had outsize rabbit or hare ears.Some were dressed as other animals, and some performed
acrobatics.Thus, the mad March hare
and the Easter Bunny of some Christian secular
celebrations may be survivals from Woden-lithi's time, over 3,000 years ago.

If there was a lunar festival, whatever
Woden-lithi may have said about that has not yet been recognized or
deciphered.

"Other gods are mentioned, but
they seem to have been relatively minor nature spirits.These latter are divided into two groups,
the more important Aesir(also sky gods, but having roles to play on earth and in the thinking of
the people), the less important Waniror earth gods, and the enemies of the gods, the giants
and monsters of the underworld (including the bed of the ocean).These lesser divinities match their more
important later derivatives, the gods of the late Bronze Age and subsequent
periods.

A list of the various divinities
whose names have so far been deciphered (by Barry Fell) on Woden-lithi's
inscribed rock platform is shown in Fig. 84.

The custom of having clowns,
and in particular those buffoons that the inscriptions
at the Peterborough site call Yule-men (see Fig. 85) may have
originated in Spain, for several sites are known in that country where images
occur of humans dressed in this manner.The lowermost figure on the right [of Fig.85] depicts a women
dressed as a Yule clown, a feature not found at Woden-lithi's site; the
Spanish Yule-lady shown here is from the Cueva de
los Letteras.The upper left
figure is lettered in Tifinag, and announces himself as a Y-LM-N, one of the Yule-men; it can be found about 5 feet northwest
of the main sun-god figure.The other
two Yule-men shown on the right side of the illustration are respectively
from 14 feet and 16 feet northwest of the main sun-god figure.The two figures on the lower left lie
about 50 feet southwest of the sun god.One is evidently a tumbler, the other a jackrabbit, or, in terms of
his European origins, a hare.In
Scandinavia to this day the equivalent of Santa Claus is
called the Yule-man (though nowadays he wears Icelandic costume, as does our
own American Santa).The Scandinavian
Yule-man also has a troop of Jule-nisser (Yule Dwarves) who accompany
him.The hare seems to have vanished
from the midwinter festival of modern times, and remains with us in the guise
of the Easter Rabbit who now brings the Easter eggs, another survival of old
Norsemen pagan customs.

There are other links with ancient
Spain, though not at Woden-lithi's site, which is predominantly
Scandinavian.Fig.
86 ....[and other examples:Fell, 1982] show sculptures of animals
that have been found in parts of New England where the stone chambers
occurs.The bison (Fig. 86) is from Lawrence,
in the valley of the Merrimack River in
Massachusetts.It recalls the
numerous Iberian sculptures, often crude as in this case, of
bulls."[A boar and a recumbent
beast, apparently a bull (Fell 1982)] were both discovered in central Vermont
by John Williams and me while we were investigating the chambers at South
Woodstock.They too recall the
ancient Spanish sculptures.

The carvings in stone in northern
Portugal also include numerous examples of animals, so much so that Professor
Santos Junior, President of the Anthropological Society of Portugal
(Sociedade de Antropologia e Etnologia de Portugal), has inferred that a
special zoolatry (religious worship of animals) too place there.One of the examples he found was attached
to a stone tablet carrying an inscription, which he sent to me.Like others from the region, where Basque
place names occur, the inscription proved to be written in the ancient Basque
tongue, using the ancient Basque syllabary (Fig. 87).The inscription disclosed that it was a
dedication to the Laminak,
subterranean monsters that are still the object of superstitious dread among
the Basque country people of today.

It is relevant to state here that
when Basque and other Spanish scholars sent these undeciphered inscriptions
to me, nothing was known in Spain or Portugal as to the language of the writing.The solution (Fig 89 & Fig 90) proved to be
one that depended wholly on the fact that the Cree, the Ojibway, and some
other Amerindian tribes have preserved this same syllabary today, and still
use it in their letters, their newspapers, and other contexts.It is mistakenly attributed to the
missionary James Evans, a Welshman who is supposed to have
"invented" the script in 1841.What Evans really did, as Fell had noted in Saga America, was to preserve and adopt the writing system that
he found already in use amonghis
flock.For this he deserves great
credit, but it is wrong to say he invented the syllabary.The system of writing goes back far beyond
the earliest Roman inscriptions in Spain and Portugal.It continued in use among Basques until
some time in the early Middle Ages.The last known example of its use is on a tablet now held in the San
Telmo Museum (Fig 89 & Fig 90).Using the Cree syllabary
as a guide (Fig. 88),Fell transliterated the signs into the
phonetic equivalents in Latin script, and then recognized the language as
Basque.Its translation appeared to
be that shown in the illustrations, and Fell submitted his decipherment of
the tablets to Dr. Imanol Agiŕe, the Basque etymologist and
epigrapher.he confirmed the
decipherment and provided a modern Basque rendering of the same text.(This, of course, is in marked contrast to
the views of those archaeologists who state that the Basque inscriptions
found in America are marks made by roots or by plowshares.For the views of linguistic scholars on
the one hand, and archaeologists on the other, reference may be made to volume
9 of the Epigraphic Society's Occasional Publications, entitled Epigraphy Confrontation in America
[1981]).A possible means of Iberian influence on the Norsemen
settlements in Canada may have been the Algonquians.For, as an inscription cut on Woden-lithi's
site shows, the actions of the Norsemen colonists were of interest to the
Algonquians, and an inscription in a language similar to Ojibwa, using the
Basque (and therefore the Cree-Ojibwa) syllabary (see Table 3), makes
reference to Woden-lithi's departure by ship.As already noted, Woden-lithi's relations with the Algonquians
appear to have been cordial, and he refers as a "foreign-friend" (Fig. 20 )to one whom he
has carved.

The beliefs and practices referred to
in this [section], worship of the sun and moon and worship of animals, appear
all to derive from the Stone Ages and were doubtless a direct carryover from
the late Neolithic.

But the Indo-European farmers who occupied
Scandinavia toward the close of the Stone Age, and who are believed by
Scandinavian archaeologists to be the direct ancestors of Bronze Age peoples
in Scandinavia, were practical country people who perceived the sun as a
supreme deity on whom the fertility of their crops depended, since only by
planting seed at times determined by the position of the sun in the
constellations could they be assured of success in reaping a
harvest."[It is of interest that
Fell (1982) does not indicate farming practices among the Norsemen colonists
in America.The evolution of
observatories in their culture in Scandinavia might have been related to
farming, but such observatories also fulfilled other functions, such as when
good sailing seasons are available, etc.].

For their more personal needs they
apparently evolved a whole pantheon of lesser deities.As the Bronze Age progressed, these lesser
gods gradually assumed the role of major gods, and eventually the sun and the
moon and the rest of nature were assigned by the priests to the lesser roles
of servants of the new gods.For the
Norsemen peoples the leading members of the new pantheon were all sky
gods.The new religion had already
developed clearly defined roles for these gods, and in that capacity they
accompanied Woden-lithi to America, as his presiding patrons.

Based on a translation of
inscriptions in America, Fell (1982) proposes a hypothetical scenario of
further migrations by Bronze Age peoples on the American continent:

Although both the ancient peoples of
Ireland and the Norsemen Teutons venerated the sun god above all others
during the Bronze Age, the former calling him by the name Bel or Grian, the latter
Sol or Sunu, each of these peoples recognized a host of lesser gods.These deities seem to have originated as
spirits of nature, each in charge of particular natural manifestations, and
later some of them were elevated to become major gods.

Thus Lugto the ancient Irish was a god of light, who repelled the
forces of darkness with his mighty spear.The Norsemen people apparently assigned much the same characteristics
to Woden or Odin, who also owned a mighty spear and dealt destruction to the
enemies of gods and men.Both ancient
Irish and Norsemen recognized a sky god who was named for thunder:Taranisin ancient Irish, Thunoror Thor in Norse.Both had divinities in charge of war, of
music, of writing skills and magic, and, especially, fertility, both male and
female.

In America something happened that
did not and could not happen in Europe.Relatively isolated and defenseless settlements of Irish and Norsemen
Teutons came into accidental and basically friendly contact.Inevitably there were intermarriages, and
each side imparted its ideas to the other.Thus arose a peculiarly American blending of European concepts, which
later permeated Amerindian thinking, as intermarriages became more extensive.

When the people from Ireland and
Scandinavia crossed the Atlantic to settle in America they brought their gods
with them.In the northeastern
settlements, where native rock abounded, they built religious centers in the
megalithic style.Some of the
chambers still carry ogam inscriptions indicating the name of the god or
goddess of the dedication (.....see Fig.168).In most cases the original inscriptions
are now unreadable or totally effaced by time and weather.As centuries went by, and the Ancient
Irish people or their Creole descendants dispersed across the continent,
their concepts changed with the changing environment.In the Northeast the mother goddess was
conceived as a female figure resembling the Punic Tanith, also as a nude
image.On the prairies the mother
goddess is represented as an Amerindian woman who’s fringed clothes spell out
in ogam her name and titles.Where
there were no rocks, no stone chambers could be built, and they and the other
megalithic structures all but vanish as we pass beyond the Great Lakes.

Chief of the Ancient Irish gods was Lug, god of the sky and of light, and
creator of the universe.His emblems
are his spear and his slingshot.With
the latter he once destroyed a one-eyed monster named Balar, who, with his sorcerer
attendants the Fir-bolg, had
gained the mastery of Ireland.Balar
is depicted in an unlettered inscription on the Milk River,
near Writing-on-Stone, Alberta.He is shown as having one leg and one arm,
held aloft over his gigantic eye, which could kill hundreds merely by its
glance.In this pictograph, Fig. 93, Lug has just
loosed the thong of his slingshot and the monster is about to die.Another and evidently much later depiction
of Lug is that in Fig. 92, where his name is given in Norse runes, one of many
examples we now have of Norsemen influence on the western Irish in North
America.Presumably the Norsemen came
down from Hudson Bay to enter the prairie lands. In this Petroglyph Lug is shown holding his magic spear, by
means of which he defeats the forces of darkness each year, to usher in the
returning spring.The last-mentioned
petroglyph occurs on cliffs at Castle Gardens in Wyoming, and at the same
site another Ancient Irish god is identified by his name written in Norse runes.This is Mabona(or Mabo), the Irish Apollo, god of
music and of sports and the presiding divinity in charge of male
fertility.In this context his symbol
is the phallus, shown in the petroglyph on the rock above him.

The Punic
traders of Iberia brought to America the coinage of Carthage and other
Semitic cities, and these coins often depict a horse (the emblem of
Carthage), or just its head and neck, or a Pegasus with wings but without the
rest of the animal's body.Since
there were no horses in the Americas at that epoch, the Ancient Irish had
vague and strange ideas as to what kind of animal it might be, apparently
able to fly like a bird, yet resembling a deer in other respects.They sometimes carved representation of
their gods or heroes riding on this magic animal of the skies," and
often birds' feet replace the hoofs."The body may resemble a boat, while the mane and tail provide
the fringe ogam required to give a title to the composition.In this respect the American Irish copied
exactly the conventions of the minters of Spain, forming the word C-B-L or G-B-L (for capull, horse), and in the case of a Pegasus, adding the suffix -n (ean,
meaning "flying").Some of
these flying heroes mounted on Pegasus-back may be intended for Norsemen
Valkyries, other have the name Mabona or Mabo-Mabona incorporated in the ogam
of the tail.

The god of knowledge, especially
astronomy, astrology, and occult sciences, and of writing skills, was Ogmios.He is always represented as having a face
like the sun, and sometimes he carries rods that spell G-M, the consonants of the word ogam.

In later centuries, long after the
time of Woden-lithi and his colonists, the descendants of the Norsemen
settlers began to migrate westward, to reach the Great Plains and, ultimately
the West Coast from British Columbia southward to an undetermined
distance.They also encountered other
Amerindian tribes, especially the many Dakota tribes, usually now referred to
as Sioux.With the passage of time
these communities all blended, and so a part of the Norsemen heritage was
introduced into the Amerindian tradition.

While these events were occurring, a
similar westward migration took place among the Irishiberian (noted as
Celtiberian) colonists who had originally occupied much of New England and
also part of the southeastern states.These ancient people from Ireland likewise reached the Plains, and
they too blended with the Sioux tribes and the Shoshone.They also had a predominant influence in
forming the Takhelne people of British Columbia.These people from Ireland spread southward along the Pacific
coast, through Oregon and much of California, where their ogam inscriptions
are often to be found in excellent states of preservation.

Inevitably the two religious
traditions, Norse on the one hand, Ancient Irish on the other,
both of them expressions of the original Indo-European pantheon, blended to
produce a composite mythology.Thus
we find Norsemen heroes depicted in what appear to be Ancient Irish roles and
vice versa.These blended traditions
persisted into modern times, and there were still artists painting ogam texts
beneath Norsemen mythological subjects as late as the first decades of the
nineteenth century.

All the foregoing inferences are
attested to by the inscriptions.In
localities such as the Milk River in Alberta, where inscriptions in ogam
abound, the bedrock is so soft that the inscriptions cannot be many centuries
old.Some declare their [recent
origin] by incorporating depictions of Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or
colonists with rifles-- scattered incongruously among petroglyphs that depict
the old Norsemen gods and heroes.

It is clear that a tradition of
sculpting replicas of still older petroglyphs must have persisted for
thousands of years, and it is very probable that many of the artists whose
work we now admire and whose ogam texts we can still recognize may not
themselves have really understood what it was that they had been trained to
sculpt.Perhaps, like the Egyptian
carvers of Roman times, they merely knew that they were repeating old and
hallowed texts from their remote ancestors, the meaning no longer known to
them.

Whether this was so or not, the
Amerindians have disclosed little of what lies behind their traditional art,
or have cloaked it behind a disguise of later-invented myths.And as for the inscriptions, many of those
that are still readable as ancient ogam cannot possibly have been cut in
ancient times.They represent a
fossil art, preserved intact from another age.We can be grateful to those artists who thus preserved the
remote past for us in this way.

King Woden-lithi gives a concise
summary of his pantheon of gods, which (like Snorri's Edda) he separates into the Aesir or sky gods and the Wanir or
earth gods.

"Chief of Norsemen sky gods is Wodenof the great
spear Gungnir and,
as stated above, he has much the same characteristics as Lug of the Gaelic
Irish (noted as Celts) and Lew of the Brythonic
Irish.He presides over magic and
owns a magic ring that Loki, his son, had made for him.

His magic spear is carved many times
at Peterborough, some of the larger versions being perhaps the work of
Algonquians copying from smaller originals.In one example (Fig. 96 & Fig. 97), located about 18
feet west of the main sun figure, the letters GN-GNN-R are
written:Gnugnir, the Ontario
version of Gungnir, by which name
Odin's spear was known to the Vikings of a later age.These and other inscriptions show that the
mythology of Odin in Viking times is fundamentally just a more elaborate
development of the mythology of the Norsemen peoples generally in the much
earlier era of King Woden-lithi.

Woden himself is depicted as a male
figure just to the right of Gungnir (Fig. 96 & Fig. 97).His name is
written W-D-N, Woden, in the
English and Germanic form of his name.

About 14 feet south of the main sun
figure another of Woden's possessions is depicted (Fig.
103).This is a peculiar forked tree, identified
as W-GHD-R-S-I-L, Ughdrasil,
matching the world-tree of the Vikings, called Yggdrasil.The name is
supposed to mean "Ugly Horse"
and its link with the tree is obscure.

Woden was also regarded as the god
who presided over the dead, with feasting and other pleasures of the flesh
for warriors who died in battle.His
assistants in bringing in the bodies of the slain for restoration to life,
were the Valkyries.There has not yet
been observed any reference to this mythology on the Peterborough site, but Fig.
94&
Fig. 95 suggest
that the myth of the Valkyries was imparted to the American migrants from
Ireland.The inscriptions depicting
these strange riders of flying steeds were
cut in nearly modern times by western plainsmen, probably Sioux, who had
inherited the Norsemen tradition." Please also refer to Figs. 98, 99, 100 & 102.

One of Woden's sons was the crafty
Loki of Viking tradition.He may well
have been venerated more highly in Woden-lithi's time, not as a crafty ill-natured
character, but as a skillful craftsman, for in the early Bronze Age technical
skills would be rare and highly valued.About 10 feet north of the main sun figure at Peterborough there is an
illustration of a galloping animal, and beneath it an ithyphallic Fig. (Fig. 104 ), with the
following text engraved:

M-GNL-M-SL-KL-AW-NW-V-GHW-D-N

(magna
lumis Loki lae wan Vighhya Slehefnir Wodena) "By sorcery, cunning and venom Loki won
the steed Sleipnir for Woden."The word Slehefnir is
assumed to be the damaged section that lies beneath, to the right.

Loki was credited by the Vikings with
having powers of persuasion that the skillful dwarves of the Mid-Earth could
not resist.Whenever Odin needed something
from the dwarf’s factories, Loki was always sent to wheedle it out of
them.Similarly, when Thunor, the
thunder god, required a weapon to defend the Aesir, it was Loki who was sent
for, and who found means of providing it.King Woden-lithi's text states that a dwarf manufactured the magic
hammer named Mjolnir for Loki to give to Thunor.This inscription is given as[Fig.
119].

Loki, despite his malevolence, was a
skillful craftsman himself, and seems in this aspect to represent the
blacksmith god of the Greeks (Hephaistos) and the Romans (Vulcan).The Ancient Irish (noted as Celtic)
equivalent of the latter two deities was Goibhnuiand he, like the
Graeco-Roman craftsman god, was lame.If, therefore, we equate Loki with Goibhnui (Fig. 105), despite their
apparent differences in temperament, we should perhaps include here the
activities preside over by Goibhnui in his new roles in America.For, as the Ancient Irishsettlers moved westward, they encountered
the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, and began
to harvest its wool by means of annual roundups.Goibhnui now became the presiding genius over the craft of
forming.Once the wool was shorn, it
passed under the aegis of the mother goddess.

At suitable locations in the
mountainous areas of the Far West the ancient migrants from Ireland hunted
the bighorn and the antelope.In
Nevada, however, and also in British Columbia, there was an annual round up
by shepherds, on foot.The
pictographs show them carrying shepherds' crooks (Fig.
106a).it is probable that the long drystone walls noted by Professors Robert
F. Heizer and martin A. Baumhoff (1962) were to facilitate driving the wild
sheep into a confined area, where they were shorn of wool.The various pictographs (Figs.106a, 106b, 107, 108, 109 & 110), some of them
rebus ogam, depict sheep, and also other animals.The spinning of yarn and various parts of the vertical loom and
its associated tools (shed battens, loom-comb [replacing a reed], and frame)
are shown in pictographs given in ...[Figs. 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165 & 166].The methods appear to be the same as those
used by the present-day Navaho.In
Nevada Professor Fell was told of persistent legends that the region was
formerly in the possession of now-vanished people called
"sheep-eaters."The
technical farmer's words appearing on some of the inscriptions are in some
cases of Norse origin.This fact, taken with
the mixed Irish--Norse features of some of the mythological inscriptions and the
occasional use of Norse runes, can only mean that a contact occurred between the
Ancient Irish migrants of the Milk River (and also of Wyoming) and Norsemen
visitors or settlers.

In Anglo-Saxon and Norsemen
mythology, Tiwis
the son of Woden (Odin) and therefore a member of the
superior sky gods, though subservient to Woden.Two striking differences are evident in the mythology of King Woden-lithi,
which antedates the historical era from which Anglo-Saxon and Norsemen
mythology derives.

First, the name of Tiw is rendered in
the ancient Germany manner, with an initial ts-sound (z of Old High
German), and so, like Thunor, Tsiw reminds us of the southern Teutons rather
than the Norsemen.

Second, his image is by far the
largest of the gods' after the sun god and the moon goddess.He is also shown as the tutelary deity of
ships.The ship depicted beside his
main image is not a warship, however, but a trading vessel, with a deep
capacious hull for cargo and without the banks of oars of a naval ship.it may well be Woden-lithi's own ship.

By tradition Tiw was the god of
battle, and he presumably had that department of human aggression under his
charge in Woden-lithi's day also.His
major image lies some 30 feet west of the main sun figure at the Peterborough
site (Fig. 111).He is shown as a stoutly built man,
standing on the initial letter TS
of his own name, his right hand held aloft, his left arm with the hand
severed, the stump dripping blood.To
his upper left stand the letters of his title L-M-Y-TH, "maimed"
(Old Norselamidhr).Beside him to his right lies the giant
wolf Wenri (Fenrir of Norsemen
mythology).According to Snorri, who
wrote in the twelfth century, Fenrir was one of the evil progeny of
Loki.He became a menace to the gods,
and Odin ordered him to be haltered.Only Tiw was willing to attempt the task, and to achieve it he had to
pacify the wolf by placing his hand in its mouth, as an earnest [gesture]
that the halter would not in reality restrict him.When the truth appeared otherwise, Fenrir bit off Tiw's arm.Obviously this myth was already
established in the early Bronze Age, since it is so clearly depicted here.

According to philologists, Tiw is the
same god as the Greek Zeus.The Old
High German name Tsiwaz, like the name by which Woden-lithi knew him,
resembles Zeus.His tasks included that
of holding up the sky.This he is
shown doing in an unlabeled premaiming situation in a petroglyph (Fig. 113) located 6 feet
west of the main sun figure [at Peterborough, Ontario].

In his role as a war god Tsiw has as
one of his symbols a battle-ax.In
Fell’s book Saga America he
recorded two iron battle-axes that had been discovered in America, though
they seem to be of Viking origin.One
was found at Cold Harbour, Nova Scotia, and the other
(Fig. 114) at Rocky Neck,
on the Massachusetts coast.They were
formerly owned by William Goodwin, who first protected Mystery Hill, and they
are now in the Goodwin Collection in the
Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.

At the time when Fell prepared the
text for Saga America (1980) he had
not realized that the Tifinag alphabet is of Norsemen origin, and
consequently he was baffled by what appeared to be Norsemen axes engraved, as
these two are, with Tifinag letters.Not expecting the alphabet to render Norse language, he
could find no Libyan match for the words the letters seemed to spell, and was
forced to record them in the book with the comment.... "The markings are
letters of the Tifinag alphabet of Libya, although the axes appear to be
Viking."

Now that we can expect Norse language
written in the Tifinag alphabet, the decipherment is clear, and we can be
sure that the ax is indeed inscribed in Norse.The inscription shows that axes of this type were awarded as
marks of honor by Norsemen kings, and that even though they are products of
the Iron Age, they retain the ancient Tifinag as a persistent tradition from
ancient times, as do many royal gifts given in modern times.The inscription may be transcribed as L-A-NS-ME-K-MM-MS-ME-L, to be understood
as Lae
sami ekjurn emum, sami eli, "Royal award for the honor of battle widows, and for the honor of
old age."That two such awards
have been discovered in North America and none apparently in the Scandinavian
countries themselves seems surprising.

Woden-lithi associates Tsiw with
ships, as his dedicatory inscription shows, and this must indicate that at
the epoch when Woden-lithi lived, the god was regarded as a tutelary deity
for sailors.Since the king was
himself a sailor, it is natural for him to have given such prominence to his
patron, greater than that which he accorded to Woden or any of the other
gods, save only the sun god.No other
references have been found to Tsiw on American rocks, not indeed to find
which god was regarded as in charge of fishing.For want of information on the subject, included here are some
of the inscriptions that relate to ships and to fisheries (Figs. 115, 116 & 117).Most of these are demonstrably Ancient
Irish in origin, some are unidentified, and merely depict ships of the Bronze
Age type.

The illustrations have detailed
captions.However, it should be
explained that Ancient Irish custom, still to be found in Ireland within
living memory, required that the local chief of any community be granted a
tax comprising one tenth part of all catches of fish.The tithe was used by the chief for the
support, not only of his own family, but also of indigent females or widows
and fatherless children.(The
American gypsies, at least in the Northeast, still maintain a similar custom,
or did so up to [1972]... when Fell was collecting linguistic material from
the Boston gypsies.)

The inscriptions that illustrate
these fishing practices come from the Tule Lake region, on the border
of Oregon and California.Although no
fishing is now carried out there, the local Indians and museum authorities
confirm that very great runs of fish used to occur in former times, and that
they were indeed caught in nets, as the inscriptions state.it is also of great interest that the unit
of measurement of fish by tally is called the M-S, to be read as Old Irish maois, the meaning of which is given in Patrick S. Dinneen's
Irish-English, English-Irish dictionary (2nd ed., Dublin, 1927, p. 709) as
"a hamper of 500 fishes."The lettering on the texts gives the
remaining details.These texts are
traced from photographs made at Tule Lake by Wayne and Betty Struble, who
detected the ogam and brought the site to Fell’s attention.

Third of the sons of Woden, and
fourth of the Aesir gods, we may note Thunor
(Thorof the Norsemen).The form of his name suggests a north German rather than Scandinavian
affinity for Woden-lithi's tongue.

Thunor was the name by which he was
known to the Anglo-Saxons, before the Vikings came to England.He is accorded much space on Woden-lithi's
rock platform [Peterborough, Ontario, Canada], and seems to have been one of
the major objects of veneration.About 24 feet south-southwest of the main sun figure.He is depicted (Fig.
119) with his sword and hammer, but no text.He wears a high-peaked conical
helmet.Some 20 feet west of the main
sun figure his famous hammer is depicted, together with his personal name, M-O-L-N-R (Mjolnir).In the Bronze Age all famous weapons had
personal names, on the model of Siegfried's sword, Volsung.Images of the short-handled hammer,
usually not labeled, are seen all over the site.About 11 feet southeast of the main sun figure Thunor himself
is depicted (Fig. 120), helmetless, arms akimbo, his hammer beside him to the
right, and its name, M-L-N-R,
inscribed to the left.In a corrupt
spelling M-N-R the hammer appears
about 45 feet to the south-southeast of the main sun figure, beside a pair of
serpents, and to the right Thunor stands, demonstrating his mighty glove, one
of the sources of his power.As
conqueror of the sea giant Ymir (Himir of the Norsemen), he may have been
accorded special veneration by Woden-lithi's
mariners.

He is shown with his high conical
helmet and his hammer also in a petroglyph composition (Fig.
123) centered at
about 15 feet northeast of the main sun figure.This shows Thunor at the outset of the final battle of the gods
against the forces of the underworld.The giant serpent-dragon of Middle Earth lies to the right, coiling
its body, with a text composed of the dot-letters of the alphabet along its
length.The text that accompanies
this composition appears to be a continuation of the text given in Fig. 119, where a dwarf
is recorded to have made Molnir for Thunor.This section reads:

N-MTH-W-N-RM-L-N-RH-KR-ML-K-KL-W-KLH-W

which may be
interpreted as Nema Thunor molni haka Orma likkja luk la hawa, "Thunor takes up Molni to strike at the
Serpent, its body lying coiled in the sea." (In Fig.
123 only the god and
his hammer, and the first three words of the text are shown.)The dragon defeated Thunor in the end,
leading to the ascent to Walhol, as recorded later in this section.

As we have already seen, the ogam
alphabet that for so long has been supposed to be an exclusively Ancient
Irish script was in fact well known in Norsemen countries as early as the
Bronze Age.This fact accounts for
the otherwise untranslatable ogam inscriptions that occur in the Western
Plains and as far west at the valley of the Milk River in Alberta, Canada.

Here occur many petroglyphs cut in
soft bedrock; they are obviously not more than a few centuries old at
most.One such is shown in Fig.124, where a
supernatural figure is depicted holding aloft what appears to be a rake.Indeed, the archaeologists who have
recorded these and similar inscriptions say just that.Now it so happens that the Ogam Tract written by the mediaeval
Irish monks describes a special kind of ogam called by them ogam
reic: literally "rake
ogam."It is not known in
Ireland as occurring in petroglyphs, nor indeed anywhere save in the
manuscripts written by the monks.Thus the American petroglyphs are the first examples to be recognized
as archaeological artifacts.

When Fell was first confronted with
these examples he naturally expected the language contained in the ogam
script to be people of ancient Ireland and related to Irish Gaelic.But the decipherment proved baffling, as
no Ancient Irish words known to him matched the concatenation of consonants
present in the rakes and in the associated finger ogam (also mentioned in the
Irish texts).

After the presence of Norse inscriptions
was made clear by the Peterborough [Ontario, Canada] texts, the solution of
the mysterious rake ogam of the Milk River petroglyphs became evident.The letters are indeed ogam, but the
language is Norse, allied to Old Norse <= Saharan?>.As can be seen from Fig.124, the "rake"
represents the hammer Mjolnir and
the god depicted is Thunor, here
rendered as ogam T-N-R.

As god of war the deity may be presumed to rule-over the art of using
weapons, whether for battle or for hunting.Fig.
125 is an example of many similar petroglyphs, in this case
written in Ancient Irish language, where hunting scenes are portrayed.it is from Site 77 near Canal Flats in
British Columbia, discovered by John Corner.This is modern work, for the medium in which it is executed is paint,
exposed to the atmosphere; another piece of evidence pointing to the long
memory of the Amerindians.The artist
was a member of the Takhelne tribe, with a spoken tongue of partly Ancient
Irish derivation."Please also
see Figs. 121
& 122.

King Woden-lithi seems to have
devoted less space on his platform to the Wanir, gods of the earth, than to
the other deities.Under the
inscribed word W-R-Y-aR (Freyar) he has
depicted a phallic god ... [eleven] feet west of the main sun figure.Beside Freyr is an up-ended ship, one of
his symbols by Norse tradition, though the connection with male fertility is
not immediately obvious.The hull of
a ship is perhaps here regarded as a phallic symbol.

The interesting interconnection
between Ancient Irish and Norsemen gods, already noted in Fig.
92, under Lug, is
again evident in a petroglyph at Coral Gardens, near
Moneta, Wyoming, photographed by Ted Sowers of the Wyoming Archaeological Survey.The Ancient Irish god Mabona is shown
below his symbol, a giant phallus and beneath is written his name, in younger
runes.Again we have evidence of a
later contact between the ancient American migrants from Ireland and Norsemen
of the period of Leif Eriksson.

Much more obvious attention is given
to the worship of the power of the phallus as a fertilizer not only of women
but of Mother Earth herself, in the shape of the great stone phallic
monuments that the Ancient Irish and Norsemen peoples erected in Europe and
that their American cousins placed at corresponding suitable sites in the New
World.That these are, in some cases
at least, Bronze Age monuments is evidenced by the presence of ogam and consain
script, making reference to ancient pagan divinities and rituals.Figs. 129 , 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, & 137illustrate typical examples in both Europe
and America...."The inferred
fertility rituals are discussed in America
BC. [Please also see Figs. 126 & 127].

That Mabo was preferred by the youth
of America to his Norsemen equivalent Freyar is made clear by the much larger
number of inscriptions dedicated to the former, and usually written in
Ancient Irish ogam of the type called fringe ogam (...Fig. 1).A telling piece of evidence is seen at
Woden-lithi's site (Fig. 128), where the male fertility god is named in ogam as
Mabo.And the reason for the
preference of young for the Ancient Irish god of youth is his three spheres
of activity-- sex, sports, and music-- all of primary interest to the youth
of every country.

In this first aspect, that of god of
male sexuality, the numerous stone phalluses and menhirs, erect or fallen, in both Europe and North America,
bear silent witness.Figs. 129, 130 & 131, show three European examples in France and Spain, and
North American examples appear in Figs. 132, 133, 134 & 135.Most of the American phalluses have fallen
into a recumbent posture.Those on
Phallus Hill, South Woodstock, Vermont, have since been transferred to the
museum of Castleton State College in Vermont.

In New England, groups of phallic stones
were erected on the summits of hills (Fig. 137).Whether these were used as calendar
determination sites is not yet established.

In British Columbia and in the Nevada
and Californian deserts, there occur inscriptions in ogam, in a Ancient Irish
language, relating to matings and the marriage bond (Figs. 138 & 139).

In addition to the worship of Mabo as
a fertility god, interest in the various games and athletic sports under the
protection of Mabo, and brought by ancient colonists from Europe is manifest
in various petroglyphs (Figs.140, 141, 142 & 143).What may be the AncientIrish ball gameof camanachdseems to
be depicted in some cases.Running
and hurling the caber are other athletic subjects, and we know from historic contacts
in the nineteenth century that the Takhelne tribe of British Columbia
practiced a sport much resembling the Scottish caber-tossing.An inscription at Cane Springs, in Clark
County, Nevada, recorded by Professors Robert Heizer and Martin Baumhof, carries
fringe ogam (Fig.143) that implies
that the game depicted can scarcely be separated from baseball, the latter an
invention attributed to New York State in modern times." [Please also
see Figs. 141 & 142].

The third aspect that Mabo assumes,
as the Apollo of the Ancient Irish, is that of the god of music.This is succinctly referred to in a Takhelne pictograph (Fig.
144) discovered by John Corner near Robson, in
British Columbia as his Site 65, where the god has the head of a lyre, while
his outstretched arms make the letter m,
and his erected phallus an ogam b,
thus spelling his name.

The lyre-faced
god appears in various inscriptions in Nevada (Figs. 145, 146 & 147), with remarkable fringe ogam inscriptions incorporated
into the petroglyphs as rebus forms.The captions to the figures give details.Designs evidently influenced by these compositions enter into
the art of the Navajo and Apache tribes,
who entered the western territories as late in wanderers from eastern Siberia
(their language still retains many recognizable Turkmenian roots).It seems likely that these late invaders
dispossessed the Pueblo peoples and acquired many of their art forms, so that
the Navajo and Apache today are regarded as the foremost exponents of
Amerindian culture in North America.In the process they seem to have acquired the Mabo rebus and converted
it into a new but similar style, expressing a wholly different tribal
mythology from that of the Ancient Irish from whom these figures originated.

Dancing to music, the dancers holding
stag's antlers, is an ancient Irish cultural feature, also reflected in the
North American petroglyphs (Fig. 148).

Amerindian musicians
possessed many different though simple types of musical instruments.But the petroglyphs depict a wider range
than was found in recent times and, in addition to the lyre, we see various
representations of the Ancient Irish harp, both the
large and the smaller kinds.The
associated ogam lettering, in a Gaelic language, is illustrated in Figs. 149 & 150, and the
captions explain this.Competitive
performances on these instruments may have been judged by priests (druids),
ensconced in seats like the curious stone ones that occur in New England (see
Fig. 151).

The conclusion we reach, then, is
that Norsemen and Irish colonists in ancient time, even as early as
Woden-lithi's epoch, came to North America and influence done another and the
Amerindian neighbors they encountered, producing a rich culture with varied
strands.The inability of the
Norsemen people to establish bronze industrial sites in America led to the
disappearance of the great trumpets, the lurs, but the various instruments manufactured from turtle
shell and wood, such as the lyre and the harp, were capable of manufacture
here, and so survived almost to modern times.

The mother goddess is depicted by the
Ancient Irish & Norsemen in America and their Amerindian descendants as a
divine being with a celestial grace, whether she be shown as a young woman,
or as an elderly grandmother figure.The Norsemen, on the other hand, depict the terrifying aspects of
worship of the goddess, in which a priestess and elaborate ritual becomes her
voice and announces mysterious instructions.The concept of a divine mother seems to be the most ancient religious
belief, for the Paleolithic peoples left behind them images and paintings of
pregnant females, apparently expressing the wonder and the importance of
fertility to the maintenance of the band or tribe.Later, when the essential preliminary role of the male in
fertilizing the female was understood, the religion seems to have changed toward
a father-god orientation, and the divine couple bred numerous divine progeny,
each of whom became responsible for one or another of the fundamental human
activities and interests.

Fig. 152 shows one of the Milk River inscriptions at
Writing-on-Stone, near Coutts, in Southern Alberta, where fringe ogam
identifies the female figure as "Byanu, Mother of the Gods, Queen of the World," the
language being Ancient Irish.Fig. 153, by way of
contrast, from the same region, shows a Norsemen version of the goddess, seen
in the guise of her priestess, as graceless and repulsive as the Irish
version is attractive.

The megalithic symbols of the mother goddess
in America are the same as she has in Europe-- the Men-a-tol or female stone, literally
"stone-with-a-hole."Fig.154 shows a
men-a-tol at Land's End in Cornwall, England, and Fig. 155 a New England
equivalent found and photographed by Hulley M. Swan at Jefferson,
New Hampshire.The precise
significance of these "holey-stones" in Europe has been
debated.In modern times engaged or
newly married couples exchange kisses through the aperture, and babies are
passed through the hole to bring good luck.These may be ancient practices.

The sun, and his celestial
manifestation as a sun god, was always appealed to for warmth, and rain to
promote growth of crops.But so also
was Byanu, the Ancient Irish mother goddess, as an inscription at Tule Lake,
California, shows (Fig.156).Wayne and Betty
Struble photographed it.Other gods were also invoked.An inscribed stone placed in an ancient plantation in New York and
found by John H. Bradner, invokes both Byanu and her divine son, Mabo.The Dakotas and Mandans invoked Thunor, in
his later transformation into a rain god.Plowing was virtually impossible in North America, for lack of
suitable draft animals.Thus we are
perhaps to interpret Woden-lithi's inscriptions [at Peterborough, Ontario,
Canada] of what appear to be plowmen (Fig.157) as no more than
a didactic reference to Scandinavian practices.A Danish version of an early Bronze Age plowman is shown in
that same figure.

When the Ancient Irish & Norsemen
traveled west and discovered the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, they
established a sheep-farming industry based on stock running wild, but rounded
up (on foot) once a year for shearing....The product of this farming industry was, of course, raw wool.This, in turn, became the basis of a
spinning and weaving industry, and the
inscriptions in Nevada indicate that the mother goddess-- or a mother goddess-- was considered the
tutelary deity of such activities.In
the guise of a female that looks like the Irish Sulis, we find inscriptions
in Nevada dedicated to some female divinity (Figs. 158 & 159).

The rocks of the Nevada plateau are rich in their
petrographic commentary on the activities of these early farmers and
wool-workers.At one site w find
depictions of needles and thread, each labeled in fringe ogam with the names
of the tools in old Gaelic.We find
pictures of embroidery stitches.One
ingenious petroglyph at Lost City, Clark County,
Nevada, is in effect an advertisement for the wool industry, showing the
production of cloth from the sheep's back by means of a looped wool thread,
with pendant threads that spell ogam letters (Fig. 160).The various stages in converting the raw
wool into yarn, then into a ball of yarn, including the carding, are all
depicted (Figs. 161, 163, 164 , 165& 166).Setting up the warp on a frame is shown on
Fig.
161, and a vertical loom of the type
afterward used by the Navajo appears in petroglyphs at Valley of Fire, Nevada
(Fig. 163).The various tools of
the weaver, the battens, rods for weaving to cause the shed to alternate
between throws of the shuttle, pegs, and loom combs (which replace the modern
reed) all appear (Figs. 162, 164 & 165).And the final
product, in this case a dress length, embroidered at the warp-ends (Fig.
166), is shown.

Other and equally important
information comes from the burial goods deposited with the bodies of the dead
at ancient burial places, such as those of the early Woodland Period
investigated by members of the Archaeological Society of Tennessee at Snapps Bridge, Near Kingsport.Here we find actual pieces of equipment,
such as loom weights, inscribed with appropriate words in ogam or Iberic, in
the Iberian (noted as Celtimberian) or Basque languages, indicating the
functions of the objects, which were evidently buried with their
owners....These latter finds came to
notice through the observations of Dr. William P. Grigsby, who first noticed
what he correctly inferred to be writing on some of the artifacts in his
large collection.

Similar artifacts are found in
Britain, as for example at the Windmill Hill site, occupied by the late
Neolithic builders of Stonehenge.These have been recorded and well illustrated, and it is plain to see
that inscriptions similar to those in North America occur, even the identical
words.And similar inscriptions to
those found on amulets in graves are also found inscribed on the stone
chambers of New England.Thus, an
invocation to the goddess Byanu, the mother-goddess....., occurs on a
Windmill Hill amulet, and a similar text was reported in 1976 in America B.C. from a stone chamber
dedicated to Byanu at South Woodstock, Vermont (also ee Mystery).

On the ceiling of the same chamber at
South Woodstock occurs a depiction of Byanu in her guise as Tanith, the mother goddess of the
southern Iberians and of their Carthaginian neighbors (Fig.168).

Near the same site John Williams and
Barry Fell found in 1975 the torso of a fallen image of a female divinity,
evidently Byanu, whose name appears in various local contexts (Fig.167).

These examples illustrate the
continuing and widespread influence of the concept of a mother goddess in
North America just as in Europe.

In Scandinavian mythology the
underworld, Jotunheim,
is inhabited by the evil progeny of Loki
and by other giants and monsters.One
of Loki's children was the giant worl Fenrir,
who became a menace to the gods, and had to be placed under restraint in a
magic halter.None dared to capture
the beast, however, until Tyr, the
god of war, allowed the wolf to take his arm in his jaws as a guarantee that
the halter would not restrain him.When Fenrir discovered that he had been tricked, he bit off Tyr's arm,
so the god is depicted as maimed.

This ancient myth, as noted previously,
is depicted on Woden-lithi's inscription [at Peterborough, Ontario, Canada]
in at least two places, Fig. 111 &
Fig 112.About 21 feet from the main sun figure,
slightly east of the north-south axis, occurs a wolf figure that is labeled L-ZF-N-R.The beast appears
to be caught in some kind of trap.The inscription seems to mean, "Fenri locked," assuming that
L-Z is the root laesa in Old Norse, "to
lock."

Another depiction is seen some 30
feet southwest-by-west of the main sun figure (Fig. 169).it shows the wolf running free.it is lettered W-N-RM-LM-N-D [= Wenri mel mond].This
evidently means "Wenri Crunch-Hand," the form Wenri being alternative to Fenri
(Fenrir in Norse), mel being the verb to
"crush" or "grind," and mond meaning "hand."The figure of the wolf is placed just to the left of the main image of
the god Tsiw, whose left hand he
has just bitten off.The god, with blood
still dripping from the wound, stands defiantly, over the conspicuous
dedication made by Woden-lithi (Fig. 111).

Two giants with similar names occur
in Norsemen mythology.One of them, Ymir, is present at the creation of
the earth, and his body is carved up to constitute the world.The other, Himir, is a sea monster that is defeated in battle with
Thunor.The version presented by
Woden-lithi's artists shows the sea giant, but he is named Y-M-R, hence Ymir.He is shown beside his ship (Fig.
170), which is
carried along the waves by a huge sea horse.The inscription reads Y-M-RN-GH-W (Ymira nokwi), readily
translated as "The ship of Ymir."The giant may have been feared by
Woden-lithi's mariners, so his defeat by Thunor would be cause for veneration
of the Thunderer.

According to Snorri's Edda, the world will end with
Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, when the
monsters of Jotunheim finally overcome the Aesir and Vanir.During the last battle Thor (Thunor of our
Ontario text) manages to hold at bay the giant serpent that encircles the
world and is called Midgardsormen (Worm of Middle Earth); at length his hammer
Mjolnir avails no more, and Thunor and the other gods succumb.Parts of this scenario are depicted in
various places on Woden-lithi's site.

A little west of a point 30 feet
south of the main sun figure there can be found a number of serpents, with
inscriptions scattered among them.The inscriptions (Fig.172) include M-O-L-N
(Mjolnir
or Old Norse),
the hammer of Thunor; R-M (orm, "serpent" in Old Norse); M-D-N-M, apparently to be understood
as Midn[gardsorm]
nama ("Worm of Mid-Earth
is its name"), nama being
a south Germanic form, replacing nefni
of Old Norse.Another serpent is labeled S-W, presumably svika, "twisting."The collection is identified (Fig. 171) as R-G-ND-M (Regin Domr, Doom of
the Gods).Another picture of the
Worm of Mid-Earth appears in the engraving of Thunor given in an earlier
[section].The word A-K-W, Old Norseakava is written beside yet
another serpent: it means "fierce."

The earth is now given over to flame,
and the Aesir gods under the leadership of Woden form in procession to ascent
the rainbow (in Norse lore called Bridge-of-the-Gods) to enter Valhalla, there
to await their own doom.This last
scene is the subject of a petroglyph engraved some five feet southwest of the
main sun-god {Fig 173} figure [at
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada].The
petroglyph includes the Tifinag letters W-L-H-L,
Walhol, which is also the
Anglo-Saxon manner of pronouncing Valhalla.Inconsequent as it seems, perhaps because of the random manner in
which the various pieces of Norsemen mythology have been ground into the rock
platform, a Yule-man seems to be taking part in the proceedings, wearing the
disguise of the equinoctial hare, while he wrestles another clown dressed as
a bear.

These ancient Norsemen myths were to
some extent acquired or inherited by the Algonquian and Sioux tribes who were
the neighbors of the colonists.Pictographs and petroglyphs of dragons and other monsters found along
the banks of the St. Lawrence [River] present features remarkably like the
monsters of Norsemen tradition.

Even more surprising is the
persistence of these stories into quite modern times among the Takhelne of
British Columbia, who speak a language derived in part from Ancient
Irish.In modern times, not more than
one or two centuries ago at most, painted inscriptions lettered in ogam
script, were created by artists who not only recalled the form of the
monsters, but also retained the ability to write the names of the
supernatural beings in legible ogam script.An example of such work, depicting Loki and the dragon of Middle
Earth, is shown in Fig.
174.It serves as a
visible reminder of how long a folk memory can persist if the demands of
tribal tradition so require.

Most of us, consciously or
unconsciously, tend to interpret the past in terms of the present.Since we ourselves use trading tokens and
coins, we assume that our remote ancestors may have done the same.But when did this custom begin?When was simple barter replaced by more
sophisticated business dealings, involving standards of exchange comparable
to coinage?In the 1950's Fell became
interested in this question, and published his findings in two papers.The conclusions he reached are relevant to
this discussion. The inquiry was prompted by events in Britain that resulted
from World War II.

At that time the people of Britain
faced a severe food shortage caused by the blockade of ships bringing farm
products from overseas.To help
overcome the crisis, every possible strip of land, no matter how narrow, was
plowed and planted.Along the ancient
highways, many of them going back to Roman or even Ancient Irish times, the
bordering verges of grass were put to the plow and then planted.But many an ancient foot-traveler had once
wandered along these routes, occasionally dropping coins by mischance, or in
other cases deliberately concealing pots of coins if danger threatened.Many a burial had remained intact when the
owner had met with ill fate, or perhaps could no longer return, or failed to
locate his treasure.Tens of
thousands of ancient coins, Roman, Saxon, and medieval, were discovered by
the plowmen.As a result the market
value of ancient coins dropped with a crash, and it became possible for many
people of quite modest means to assemble valuable and instructive collections
of these intriguing relics of our ancestors.

Since the Anglo-Saxon silver pennies
are the oldest inscribed artifacts we possess from the ill-documented period
that followed the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain in the fifth century
after Christ, Fell began to research the Old English manuscripts in an effort
to discover what role these coins played in our ancestors' daily lives;
later, as stated above, he summarized his findings in two papers published in
1954 and 1955.What at first puzzled
me greatly was that nearly all the references to monetary transactions that
occur in the Saxon literature are to shillings,
pounds, and marks-- yet the only coins that are found in the soil are pennies and pieces of lesser value,
such as feorthungs (farthings, that
is, quarters of a penny, cut with shears for change) and some irregular coins
called stykas, issued in the first
years of the Saxon occupation.

Now, a typical Saxon entry relating
to money is represented by this passage, which Fell translated from the
seventeenth-century laws of King Inc of Wessex:"If a man owns a hid of land, his wer [that is, property value] is to be reckoned at 120 shillings,
half a hide 80 shillings, and if he owns no land 60 shillings."Apparently taxes were apportioned according
to one's wer.Again, King Aethelberht, who died in the
year 616, decre3d that if a man had one ear smitten off in combat, the
aggressor must pay him six shillings amends.There is a whole table of possible injuries and the appropriate
compensation payable in each case-- injury to the mouth, 12 shillings; loss
of an eye, 50 shillings; the four front teeth, 6 shillings each; an eyetooth,
4 shillings; the first premolar, 3 shillings; other teeth a shilling each--
and so on.

But what were these "shillings"?Certainly not the silver coins of that name that were first struck in
England in the Middle Ages.It turns
out that in Saxon times all these monetary terms were merely units of
account.A shilling in nearly every
case actually means a sheep.The true equations of account were as
follows:

6 sheep equal 1
ox

8 oxen equal 1
man

30 silver pence
equal 1 ox48
shillings weigh one pound

5 silver pence
equal 1 sheep1 sheep equal 1
shilling

240 silver pence
equal 1 man1 man equals 1 pound of silver

Almost all debts were extinguished,
not by coin of the realm (which was scarce) but by barter payments of sheep
and oxen.The system remained almost
intact until inflation set in, caused by labor scarcity during the Black Death (1349).hence, we may hazard the guess that the Saxon system was an ancient
one, and that it had been introduced from Denmark and northern Germany, the
homelands of the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons who invaded England after Roman
rule ended.

According to the ancient historians
of Greece and Rome, the oldest city in Europe is Cadiz (Gades of the ancients), founded by Phoenician traders in the
twelfth century BC.The Phoenician
script rapidly spread through southern and western Spain and Portugal, soon
assuming a characteristic Iberian
form in which certain letters were written somewhat differently from their
original form as developed in Phoenicia (Lebanon), where the parent cites of
the Phoenicians, Tyre and Sidon, are located.Later, as the Phoenician colony of Carthage, in Tunisia, became
independent, other varieties of Phoenician script arose and spread through
the Iberian Peninsula.In addition,
mysterious scripts of apparently native Iberian origin occur in Spain and
Portugal in archaeological contexts that certainly long antedate the Romans
and may well antedate those of the Phoenician traders of Cadiz.

At the time when Cadiz was founded
the Norsemen peoples were settled in lands that we now call Germany and
Scandinavia.Their cousins the
Pre-Irish occupied much of Gaul and parts of Britain, and were beginning to
penetrate into Spain.Much of the
Iberian peninsula was peopled by tribes who probably spoke Basque, and the
Basque philologist Imanol Agiŕe is of the opinion that Basque-speaking
tribes were also to be found in Britain and Ireland as well as parts of Gaul.

Archaeological excavation discloses that these northern
peoples were still in the Stone Age as late as 1800 BC, and their emergence
into the Bronze Age during the century that followed was occasioned by trade
contact with Mediterranean peoples, from whom they obtained bronze swords and
elaborate knives and other sophisticated manufactures.Apparently only the wealthiest members of
Norsemen society could afford these imported luxuries, for we find carefully
chipped flint imitations of the bronze knives, apparently the property of
commoners who could not afford to purchase the bronze originals.According toe the ancient historians the
Phoenicians traded with these northern peoples, taking such valuable wares as
purple cloth for their chiefs, and the bronze weapons mentioned earlier, and
receiving in return such materials as tin from Cornwall and amber from the
Baltic lands.A so-called amber route
has been traced, leading from Denmark southward along the Danube to the
Rumanian ports of the Black Sea.But
was this the only door by which the Norsemen peoples could face the trading
world of the Mediterranean?it seems
unlikely, for the Bronze Age rock carvings of Scandinavia depict fleets of
ships similar to those of the Mediterranean peoples (especially the Libyans
of North Africa), and such vessels could certainly cross the open sea.

An actual example of one of these
vessels (though excavated from a site thought to date to about the fifth
century BC) is known, and Fell examined it in Copenhagen in 1953.About 13 meters long, it is constructed in
a manner very similar to that of the Polynesian oceangoing
craft:that is to say, of adzed
wooden planks held together, not by nails or dowels, but sewn together by cordage.With similar vessels, called waka, the ancient Polynesians could cross open spans of the
Pacific of 3,000 miles, such as the gap between Tahiti and New Zealand.We know from carefully kept traditional
Polynesian sources that the 3,000-mile journey was covered at a rate of 100
miles a day, so that a voyage to new Zealand lasted only a month; vegetable
tubers were stored in the lower part of the hull, fish were caught each day,
and rain supplemented the drinking water carried in gourds.Carbon dating has shown that human
settlement of New Zealand had been achieved at least by the tenth century AD,
as Maori tradition also affirms.

The Polynesian
voyages had spanned the Pacific in the centuries before the occupation of
the southernmost region, New Zealand, and this historical fact is accepted
without question by archaeologists.It has therefore always seemed strange that European and American
archaeologists seem to have so much difficulty in conceiving that the people
who built the Bronze Age ships of Europe could not also have made similar
transoceanic voyages.However,
leaving aside for the moment the question of transoceanic sailing, it is
surely not to be doubted that the Scandinavian skippers of the Bronze Age
must certainly have made voyages along the coasts of the Baltic and the North Sea.It is
inconceivable that any people who inhabited a seagirt land would build ships
if it were not their avocation or profession to sail wheresoever their fancy
and sea skills sufficed to prompt adventure or trading voyage.

Inevitably the Scandinavians must
have discovered that Phoenician ships and traders were working the western
approaches to Europe.Inevitably
their interest would turn upon the valuable trade goods of Phoenicia,
available to them either by peaceable trading of the Baltic
amber that the Semitic visitors so much craved, or by piratical attack if
circumstances might make such a course seem profitable.Homer and Hesiod, both of whom wrote of the
Greek mariners of the Bronze Age, tell us that farmers turned pirate during
the summer and returned to reap their crops in the fall, bringing ill-gotten
treasure and Phoenician slave women as booty from the summer's expeditions.It may be taken as given that the Ancient
Norsemen would do much the same.

If, then, the Bronze Age Norsemen
encountered Phoenician or Iberian traders, either as visitors to their own
lands, or as people to whose shores they themselves paid visits, would they
not acquire from them a knowledge of writing skills?It seems they did indeed, as the following
implies.

One of the best known of the Danish
archaeological sites is that located at Mullerup Mose,
in the western part of the island of Zealand.The older name of the site was Maglemose,
and under the latter name there has been designated a Stone Age culture whose
remains are found there.The site,
like many others of the Stone Age, spans a long period of time, in this case
thought to range from about 7000 BC down to 1500 BC.Its later elements, if the dating is
correct, would therefore overlap with the onset of the Bronze Age, in the
shape of the first trading visitors from Phoenician Iberia, or the return of
Norsemen ships from visits to Iberia.

Among the curious artifacts
attributed to the Maglemose people are a series of engraved bones (Fig. 175 14-1), the
purpose of which would be hard to determine were it not for the fact,
hitherto overlooked, that small inscriptions in the Iberic alphabet can be
found on some of them.

Engravings are found of oxen (cows or
heifers) and, beside them, or drawn separately, meshwork patterns that can be
recognized as the common European symbol
for cloth or weaving, often found engraved on loom
weights, for example.On one
engraving of a cow we find the Iberic letters that spell (reading from right
to left in the Semitic manner) W-'A-G.The middle letter, resembling an A, is the letter 'alif, pronounced
like the initial A in the German word Apfel:
that is, with a slight glottal click.Iberian writers did not use vowels, and they regarded 'alif as a
consonant.So the word is to be
pronounced as wag, with a glottal
catch in the voice.In the modern
Scandinavian tongues there is no such word, nor does it occur in the related
Teutonic tongues, nor in the less closely related Ancient Irish tongues.But in the Latin family the root is the
base of all the common words for cow in Latin itself (vacca), Spanish (vaca),
Portuguese (vaca), French (vache), Italian (vaca) and Rumanian (vacă).The Swiss philologist Julius Pokorny,
after comparing the whole range of words for cow in ancient and modern
Indo-European languages, concluded that there were once several different roots
used by the various dialects of ancient Indo-Europeans, and that one of the
roots must have been uak or wak.Evidently the people who spoke the language used at the Maglemose site
around 1500 BC used that particular root, and pronounced the terminal guttural
as a g rather than a k.This does not necessarily mean that the Maglemose people were not
Norsemen, or that they were displaced members of the Latin group.it probably merely means that the word wag was widely recognized by the
various trading peoples of Bronze Age Europe as being a term for cow.And why should a cow be depicted, and
labeled in writing, on a bone, beside a depiction of fabric?

The answer is not far to seek.Beside one of the engravings of the symbol
for cloth we find the Iberic letters that spell Q-D (Fig.
176), which is the
Phoenician manner of writing KH-D, the vowel as usual left unexpressed.This word again matches an Indo-European
root identified by Pokorny:kwei-, with a terminal -d as the sign of the past
participle.It answers to the modern
English word quit and the Old Norsekvitr, as well as many other modern
and ancient European forms of the root [e.g., German Quittung], all conveying the sense
of "quittance" or "paid."In fact, these bones are evidently
receipts issued by some trader to persons who have purchased from him cloth
to the value of 6 shillings:that is
to say, one cow.And to support this
inference we have in the Old Norse language<= Saharan?> special words, such as kugildi and kyrlag, both meaning "the value of a cow" and
corresponding to the Saxon unit of 6 sheep or 30 pence, equaling "...
one ox . (click
to see monetary terms).The equation may have varied a little; for
example, we know that in one English summer, sheep had become so plentiful
that the exchange rate (angilde)
fell drastically and became 3 pence to 1 sheep, so that a cow could then only
be rated at 18 pieces of silver.In
general, I think the standard rate was the one I have stated.There were no pennies minted in the days
of the Maglemose trader, but if they had been, I think his price for a bolt
of woven cloth would be reckoned at 30 pieces of silver, which in Saxon terms
is yet another way of saying "the wages of an able-bodied man for one
month's work," for a Saxon earned a penny a day and, by the laws of King
Alfred and King Guthrum, who ruled the English and Danes, "An Englishman
and a Dane are reckoned as of equal value" (Their wives were not so
regarded.The present-day advocates
of equal rights for women may trace their complaints back at least to the era
we are discussing, when a woman was reckoned as having a value of one
half-man, and was accordingly paid one half-penny for a day's labor in the
harvest.To buy her bolt of cloth,
then, she must work for 60 days or have a wealthy husband.)

And why we receipts
issued for the purchase of goods?Receipts or "quittances" were the invention of traders, who
issued them to their customers for the same reason that your modern
supermarket or drugstore staples a mechanically printed receipt to your
purchase-- to prove that you have not stolen the goods.Traders in ancient Europe would indeed
have had to keep a wary eye for shoplifters, as dozens of eager farmers and
their wives fingered and examined the wares.After a purchase was made, the customer would be given a formal
receipt, already engraved in advance at the stipulated value.Complaints against shoplifters could then
more easily be handled by the local chieftain, who would know that no more
visits from traders could be expected unless he saw to it that due
restitution was made.With such
homely materials as these pieces of engraved bone, the life of our remote
ancestors acquires a new dimension, one much more familiar to us than the
notion that they were savage barbarians.

An important part in the recognition
of the language and origins of ancient peoples consists in studying their
grave goods closely in search of inscriptions.Small but telltale comments or notations often occur on objects
that look unimportant but that formed some part of household or artisan's
equipment.For example, loom weights
may carry a notation indicating whether they belong to the warp of a standing
loom or to the pairs of threads that form part of a so-called card loom.Archaeologists are prone to overlook
these, supposing them to be some decorative marking of no significance.Thus, Basque token coins of the second
century BC, issued in imitation of Aquitanian silver coins of the Ancient
Irish and carrying an ogam statement in the Basque language have been
erroneously identified as "buttons" or "necklace beads," and classified as Aurignacian
artifacts of 20,000 BCIn America
stone loom weights, labeled in ogam with the Ancient Irish word meaning
"warp," have been identified as Amerindian
"gorgets."Pottery impress
stamps, labeled to that effect in Iberic script, have been mistaken for
decorated combs.Cases could be
multiplied of similar mistakes.The
errors arise from the fact that archaeologists often do not realize what
important light epigraphers can throw on their finds, and that what may be
mistaken for mere decoration is often an ancient form of script, which can
identify the people who once owned and used the artifacts.

The occurrence of burials with
associated inscribed relics was first reported for North America in 1838,
when a tumulus at Grave Creek, Moundsville,
West Virginia (Fig. 179), was excavated
and yielded an inscribed stone tablet, obviously written in some alphabet
related to the Phoenician or Carthaginian (Fig.
180).When
a Danish authority on scripts, Dr. Rafn at Copenhagen University, was sent a
copy of the writing on the stone he promptly identified it as being in one of
the Iberian scripts.As Grave Creek
is 300 miles from the sea, the implication seemed to be that an Iberian
settlement had once occurred in North America-- a notion that later
archaeologists rejected.hence the
Grave Creek grave goods and the included tablet were either forgotten or
attributed to the treacherous invention of forgers." [Please also see Fig.
181 for European example].Edo Nyland has translated the Horse Creek Petroglyph of West Virginia,
finding the text written in the Basque Language (see Horse Creek Petroglyph).

In more recent times more artifacts
have been found with inscriptions in Iberic (as well as other ancient
European scripts) and have been recorded and published, but only as
"decorated" artifacts.Since archaeologists did not expect to find inscribed artifacts, they
were unaware of what might constitute an inscribed artifact."Dr. William P. Grigsby of east Tennessee,
who has assembled one of the largest collections of excavated artifacts of
eastern North America, began, after reading America B.C., to recognize on some of his specimens markings that
appeared to match both Iberian letters and ogam script; he wrote to draw
Fell’s attention to his specimens and then allowed me to research them.

When the attention of archaeologists
was drawn to the presence of ogam inscriptions on the artifacts as also on
some of the megalithic chambers, their response was often disbelief.Their skepticism is based on the mistaken
notion, long held, "that ogam was invented no earlier than the fourth
century A.D., for use in Ireland."The best answer to criticisms of the kind cited lies in numismatics,
for dates of coins can be established with considerable accuracy.

Illustrated in Fig.
177 are two Ancient
Irish silver coins of the second century BCThey are imitations of the coinage of a Greek trading center in Spain
named Emporiom.The lower example,
which dates from before 133 BC, is lettered in Iberian script, and reads nomse, the Celiberian version of the
original Greek word for a coin, nomisma.the upper example is drawn from a
specimen, now in the British Museum, of a silver coin of the Gauls of
Aquitania.it has been dated (Allen, Celtic Coins, British Museum, 1978) to
the second century before Christ.The
ogam inscription is in ogam consaine and therefore omits the vowels.It reads N-M-S (nomse, coin), and below are the letters L-G, probably the mint-mark of the city of Lugdunum in
Aquitania.A clear photograph of the
inscription may be seen on page 35 of Allen's CelticCoins.

This disposes of the claim that
"ogam was invented in the fourth century AD at the earliest."We shall now deal with the remark that
ogam "is peculiar to the Celts and in particular to the Irish… the use
of “Celts” here is vague.

The bone disk with an engraved design
and ogam inscription, shown in Fig. 178, is one of a number of similar examples found at the
Paleolithic site at Laugerie-Basse, in the Basque country of the Pyrenees
adjacent to the old Pre-Irish (noted as Celtic) kingdom of Aquitania, from
which the previously mentioned coin derives.Archaeologists have identified this disk as "a bead from a
necklace, or less probably, a button." and it has been described as an
artifact made by the cave-dwelling Paleolithic people of Langerie-Basse.

These statements cannot be
correct.The ogam consaine
inscription reads in the Basque language S-H-T
(šehe-te), which means, "to serve as money."More precisely, the standard Diccionario of Azukue explains that
the word refers to what numismatists call a billoncoin of very
small value; "billon" means a debased alloy of silver.Clearly the bone disk is a Basque
imitation of the coinage of Aquitania and can be dated to about the same
period as the piece it simulates: the second century BC.Like many other inscriptions of ancient
Europe-- and America-- it has nothing to do with Ireland, nor does it express
an Ancient Irish tongue.it is
improbable that the engravers of any of these coins were "familiar with
the Latin Language," nor should such a familiarity have any relevance to
the subject.

Many other Iberian (noted as
Celtiberian) and Gaulish numismatic examples of ogam consain can be
cited.However, we now refer to the inscriptions
found in North America, written in Iberic script (like that of the Grave
Creek mound) and using Basque or other Iberian language.In the case of the Iberian script cut on
stones in Pennsylvania, and reported by me as Basque in 1974, the Basque Encyclopedia now includes these
inscriptions as the earliest recognized Basque writing,.."This is "in contract to American
archaeologists claim that they are marks made by roots of trees or by
plowshares.When Dr. Grigsby first
discovered the Iberian script on some of his artifacts, the signs he found
were precisely the same set of letters that make up the Iberic alphabet, and
which had earlier been found on the grave markers and boundary stones of
Pennsylvania.Asked if these markings
are caused by miniature plows, archaeologists have thus far maintained a
stony silence." [It is worth noting here that before the recent
decipherment of Mayan scripts in Mexico and Central America, American
archeologists steadfastly maintained that there was no "writing" of
any kind in America].

There are also quite independent and
unrelated reasons for thinking that ancient European voyagers came to
America.They concern the mining of
metals.

For the past twenty years leading
mining engineers and university metallurgists have been seeking from
archaeologists and explanation of a most baffling mystery in the history of
mining technology.So far no answer
has been found.

Around the northern shore of Lake Superior,
and on the adjacent Isle
Royale, there are approximately 5,000
ancient copper mine workings.In 1953 and 1956 Professor Roy Drier led two Michigan Mining and Technology
expeditions to the sites.Charcoal
found at the bases of the ancient mining pits yielded radiocarbon dates
indicating that the mines had been operated between 2000 BC and 1000 BC.These dates correspond nearly to the start
and the end of the Bronze Age in northern Europe.The most conservative estimates by mining engineers show that
at least 500 million poundsof metallic copper were removed over
that time span, and there is no evidence as to what became of it.

Archaeologists have maintained that
there was no Bronze Age in Northern America and that no contacts with the
outside world occurred.On the other
hand, the mineralogists find themselves obliged to take a different view: it
is impossible, they argue, for so large a quantity of metal to have vanished
through wear and tear.An since no
large numbers of copper artifacts have been recovered from American archaeological
sites, they conclude that the missing metal may have been shipped
overseas.Such an opinion, as is
obvious, now becomes entirely reasonable, for the inscriptions of Woden-lithi
[at Peterborough, Ontario, Canada] declare that copper ingots were his
primary targets in coming to Canada.Previous shippers must have passed the information to the Norseman
king, since otherwise he could not have known that copper was available and
that a suitable trade commodity in exchange would be woven fabrics and cordage.

Thus the sum total of evidence from
burial sites, from the chance discovery of burial marker stones and boundary
stones, from the other sources mentioned ...[previously], all adds up to a
consistent and simple explanation of all the baffling facts; it is simply
this-- European colonists and traders have been visiting or settling in the
Americas for thousands of years, have introduced their scripts and artifacts
and skills, and have exported abroad American products such as copper.
[Please also see Figs. 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 189 & 190].

In the 1960's a Swiss Scholar, Dr. Rudolph Engler, drew attention to the extraordinary
similarity existing between the rock carvings of ships engraved in Scandinavia
during the Bronze Age and certain rock carvings found in North America.Fell (1982) continues, "Dr. Engler's
name and his thought-provoking book Die
Sonne als Symbol (The Sun as a Symbol) are still little known in America,
unfortunately.he expressed the
opinion that an explanation for the facts would one day be supplied by
epigraphic research.Certain easily
recognizable symbols are found beside the Scandinavian ship engravings, and
the identical symbols occur beside the American ones.When Engler wrote his book, however, none
of the symbols had been deciphered, and consequently the writing-- for such
it appeared to be-- remained unread and mysterious.We may speculate as to whether the Scandinavian rock engravings
of ships may conceal a message unperceived by us because of the infantile
aspect of the art itself.

One way to examine the matter is to
let our mind's eye escape from the trammels of the age in which we happen to
be born, and to take flight in fancy through time and space, to watch the
artists at work (Figs. 191 & 192).

Our first stop is to be on the Baltic
seashore at Namforsen, in the Gulf of Bothnia, in
northern Sweden.As we touch down, a Bronze
Age artist has just engraved a representation of a ten-oared boat, with the
crewmen represented as plain sticklike marks.he now takes up his gouge and hammers out a bent left arm on
each of two facing crewmen.Next, to
our surprise, he adds what seems an utterly irrelevant detail, a stylistic
head of a horse suspended in midair (so it would seem) above the vessel's
stern.Next we take flight southward
to the island of Sjaelland, in Denmark, to watch
another artist at work near Engelstrup.he has chosen to decorate a boulder.First he carves a stylized ship, a twenty-oared vessel.Again the crewmen are shown like vertical
pegs.he now adds two more men, one
at the bow and one suspended above the other rowers.Each of these two figures is now given a
bent arm.Next (and this time we are
prepared for it) he adds a horse in midair above the stern.Now we take flight across the Atlantic to
visit one of King Woden-lithi's artists [near Peterborough, Ontario,
Canada].He, too, has cut a ship
engraving, some 15 feet due east of the main sun figure.He has cut only 6 rowers.He now adds a larger stick figure at the
bow, taking care to bend the forearm.Last, as we expect him to do, he adds a somewhat misshapen horse,
suspended over the stern.

As we watch, [the Canadian engraver at Peterborough] then
walks across the site to a point that lies about 12 feet southwest of the
central sun figure, where other engravers have begin to lay out the figures
of a zodiac.He cuts a four-oared
ship.Beside it he engraves a man in
the bow and a very pregnant woman in the stern, and above them he engraves a
large ring-shaped motif.Meanwhile,
our Swedish and Danish artists have been busy.When we return to Engelstrup we find that the Dane has added a
second ship to his boulder.Beside
it, he has placed two figures, a man and a woman, and between them he has
engraved a very conspicuous ring-shaped object.As for the Swede, in his remote Bothnian fastness, when we
arrive there we find he too has added a second ship, has carved a man and a
pregnant woman beside it, and over their heads he has placed a ring-shaped
design.

Now, to an epigrapher, a sequence
such as just described-- and the actual engravings do exist, at the places
named-- can mean only one thing: the artists in each case were following a
formalistic, well-defined system of writing.The scribes of ancient Egypt had similar procedures.Egyptian writing
depends on the use of the rebus--
a word that is easy to depict as a picture is used to indicate another word
that sounds the same but that cannot be represented by a picture.Here is the principle, as the Egyptians
developed it.Suppose you want to
write the word man or male.That is easy, for you can make a little pictograph, a matchstick
figure or a more elaborate one, depicting a man.The reader sees a man, and is expected to read "man,"
as indeed he will.But suppose you
wanted to write, not man, but brother.That is much more difficult, for no matter how accurately you
depict your own or someone else's brother, the average reader (who knows
neither of the persons) will just say "man."How can you make him understand that the
word intended is brother?The Egyptian discovery lies in the fact
that in the Egyptian language the word brother
is pronounced like sen.But in that language there is another,
readily depictable, thing that was also called sen-- namely, a ladle.So
the solution is to draw a pictograph of a man, and then beside it place a
pictograph of a ladle.

All that then is needed is to ensure
that you teach your young people to read, and that in turn means teaching
them to recognize in each word a classifier
(or determinant) and a second
element called the phonoglyph
(sound-giver).In the word brother the man picture is the
classifier, telling the reader that the word has something to do with male
human beings, and the ladle picture is the phonoglyph, telling the reader
that the male human has a name that sounds like sen.

When Professor Fell lived in
Copenhagen he became acquainted with Icelanders, whose language has preserved
most of the features of Old Norse.They delight in
word play and also are noted for the high proportion of poets in their
population.One whom he knew used to
invent risqué punning games to tease some innocent party.He would first dream up some complicated
pun in Danish and then make me say what appeared to be a harmless statement,
the others present waiting breathless to see what would result.When Fell knew the words, he would then
say, "Faster, say it more quickly," whereupon the entire room would
dissolve in laughter.To Fell’s
innocent inquiry he would then be told that, by saying the words faster, he
had made them run together to form a totally different and usually quite
obscene statement: one of those Old Norse customs for
whiling away the long winter nights along the Arctic Circle.In Polynesia Fell encountered similar
customs, there called riddles and taken very seriously by some
anthropologists whose knowledge of the language was too slight to enable them
to realize the traps they were led into.Entire articles appear in the Journal of the Polynesian Society in
which the unwary authors have reproduced scores of the most scurrilous
material, thinly disguised as something different by dividing the words in
different places.These so-called
riddles were also a means of passing the long evenings.Also, tribal lore deemed to be too sacred
for ordinary ears can be concealed in complex puns that the uninitiated does
not fully comprehend.

With these experiences in mind, and
knowing now as we do that the language spoken by the Bronze Age engravers of
Scandinavia and Ontario is a Norse language, we can test whether the inconsequential
assemblages of horses in midair, men with bent arms, and rings gazed upon by
male and female matchstick figures may be written puns, like ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphs.The test, of course, is
to utter aloud the names of the depicted objects in sequence.

Since the Danish example carries both
of the statements on the same stone, one above the other, we will use that
one.

"In English we have: (reading
each line from left to right):

English:People, arms bent, and a horse.A man and a woman at a ring gaze.

English:Men to the keeled sun-ship at dawn give
praise, and to the moon-ship at her night launching.

Thus, the seemingly childish pictures
are readily seen to be not pictures, but hieroglyphs.They seemed to be examples of Stone Age
writing, poetic and religious, hallowed by centuries of use before the Bronze
Age and carefully preserved intact as historic and religious expressions of
piety from a former age.

By treating the messages of the
Bronze Age as literal and childish, we have completely failed to interpret
the true sense they impart.The
rock-cut petroglyphs deserve the close attention of linguists, who may be
expected to produce more perfect interpretations than those that can be
offered.Often linguists are prone to
spend so much time splitting hairs over dictionary-authorized spellings and
grammatical niceties that they often forget that ancient peoples had no
dictionaries, no written standards of spelling, and that the grammar of each
hamlet and village was likely to deviate from that of its neighbors.

Before going further with the account of Norsemen
exploration in the far northern seas we should pause to take note of events
in the Mediterranean world at the onset of the twelfth century BC.These were turbulent times in the southern
lands, where violent attacks by a mysterious group of raiders referred to as
the Sea Peoples laid in ruins the Aegean civilization and even threatened the
very survival of the Egyptian monarchy.Egypt at this time was ruled by one of the most powerful of the
Pharaohs, Ramesses III, who reigned from 1188 to
1165 BC.

Only the smoke-stained ruins now
remain to speak mutely of the onslaught that suddenly struck down the
peaceful trading empire of the Aegean peoples who fell victims to the raiders
from the sea.In Egypt a stout and
effective resistance was made against the pirates, adequate warning having no
doubt reached the Nile Delta when the disasters occurred in the archipelago
to the north of Egypt.As to what
happened next, we are almost wholly dependent upon Egyptian records carved at
Medinet Habu to memorialize the defeat by Ramesses III of the Libyans and Sea
Peoples in 1194 and 1191 BC., and a final attack in 1188 BC. by yet one more
wave of Sea Peoples, this time not from Libya but from the
east.In the bas-reliefs that depict
the naval battles (Fig.193), the defeated Sea Peoples are represented as having a
European cast of face.Some of them
are shown wearing hemispherical helmets that carry two recurved
upward-directed horns.For other
clothing they wear a kilt.Their
weapons are swords and spears, whereas the Egyptian marines are armed with
bows and arrows, and are shown able to attack the invaders with a fusillade
before the Sea Peoples could come near enough to board the Egyptian
vessels.According to Ramesses III,
the defeated remnants of these invaders fled westward to Libya.Two centuries later the descendants of the
invaders seized power in Egypt, reigning as the XXII or Libyan dynasty for a
span of 200 years.

The suggestion has already been made
by other writers that the Sea peoples may have included Norsemen sailors,
largely because the monument at Medinet Habu depicts some of them as men that
look like Vikings.Fell expressed a
view that the inscriptions have forced upon him:that it is very probable that the Sea Peoples included
substantial naval detachments from the Baltic region,
that their language was a Norse dialect of the Indo-European family, that the so-called
"Libyan" alphabet is in fact an alphabet
of Norsemen, or at least northern European origin, and that it was taken to
Libya by the defeated Sea Peoples who survived the Battle
of the Nile.For some reason the
alphabet they introduced has continued in use throughout subsequent Libyan
history, whereas in its northern homeland it died out, to be replaced by
runes.Fell hazarded the guess that
the blond Tuaregs who clung most tenaciously to the "Libyan"
alphabet are probably descended from Norsemen immigrants around the time of
the Sea Peoples' invasions.All these
proposals may seem bold inferences, but there seemedlittle in the way of plausible alternatives
in the light of these new finds of supposed Libyan inscriptions in Europe.

It is, after all, a question of relative motion.We thought at first that Libyan voyagers
had traveled to Scandinavia, to leave their script there as a calling card.It now seems that the script is Norse, and that
Norsemen ships and crews carried it to Libya, where it survived."Recent articles in National Geographic Magazine, confirm the possibility that
Norsemen peoples brought writing to Mediterranean lands in prehistoric
times.Barry Fell’s suggestion that
Egypt might have had intense contact with North America is strongly supported
by the huge boats, which were discovered in 1950 adjacent to Khufu’s great
pyramid.They were buried between
2589 and 2566 B.C..One has been
restored and it shows considerable wear as if it had gone on long journeys.Its length is 43.63 meters, width 5.66
meters (see Egyptian Boat).This ship was perfectly capable of
crossing the Atlantic.The other
boats were left intact, awaiting additional funding to rebuild them as
well.An excellent article about
these boats may be found in the April/May 2004 issue of Ancient Egypt
Magazine.

The English language is a member of
the Teutonic family of tongues, to which belong
also German and the Scandinavian languages.Until now the oldest examples of Teutonic language have been short
runic texts from about the time of Christ.

King Woden-lithi's written version of
his own tongue [at Peterborough, Ontario, Canada] has given us the first
decipherable information on how our ancestors spoke 4,000 years ago.With the aid of his American inscription,
the fragmentary related inscriptions in the same alphabet, found in
Scandinavia, can now also be deciphered, and they prove to be the same
language as Woden-lithi's, or nearly so.Also, aided by this new information, we can now begin to solve the
late Stone Age hieroglyphic rebus inscriptions.Adding these Neolithic forms to the alphabetic versions given
us by Woden-lithi, one can now list some of the basic vocabulary of the
Bronze Age Teutonic peoples."The list made from the above sources was provided by Fell (1982) in
Table 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d, 4e."Words inferred from a Neolithic
rebus are prefixed with an asterisk (*).

Pronunciation.-- King Woden-lithi's language was evidently pronounced
with a strong pervading aspiration.Initial r is probably hr.Two signs for r appear in his alphabet.One of them is apparently to be rendered
as -ar, or -or.The sign for d seems always to occur in words
where Old Norse<= Saharan?> has a letter that also occurs in Old
English; its sound is the th in words like this, then.The letter t
appears in both unaspirated and aspirated forms.The aspirated form, here rendered as th, is to be pronounced
as th in with.

Fell (1982) noted that several
outstanding facts become increasingly apparent from various epigraphic
expeditions.He stated, "One is
that we have greatly underrated the achievements of the Bronze age peoples of
northern Europe.We have long known,
from their conspicuous carvings that constitute the rock art of the Bronze
Age, that the North Sea and the Baltic were the home waters of fleets of
ships.What we have failed to realize
is that those same ships and characteristic Bronze Age style, are also depicted
on the rocks and cliffs of the maritime regions of eastern North
America.And now it is also apparent
that these same matching petroglyphs, on both sides of the Atlantic, are also
accompanied by readable texts cut in ancient scripts that are likewise found
on either side of the Atlantic.

What this means, of course, is that
the ancient shipwrights made sound vessels, whose skippers and crews sailed
them across the ocean, thereby fulfilling their builders' dreams.Flotillas of Ancient Norsemen, and Baltic ships each summer set their prows to the
northwest, to cross the Atlantic, to return later in the season with cargoes
of raw materials furnished by the Algonquians with whom they traded.To make these crossings they depended in
part upon the sea roads that had been opened up by the amelioration of the
climate at the peak of the Bronze Age [see Climate] .As
oceanographers have inferred, the polar ice melted then, and the favorable
westward-flowing air and water currents generated by the permanent polar high
now became available to aid in the westward passage.The return voyage, as always, could be
made on the west wind drift, in the latitude of around 40E-north latitude, as
Columbus rediscovered.While these
Norsemen traders opened up the northern parts of North America, other sailors
from the Mediterranean lands were doing similar things..., but their outward
voyage lay along the path that Columbus employed, utilizing the
westward-blowing trade winds, found at latitudes below 30E N.Both sets of navigation, though employing
different outward routs, were obliged to use the same homeward track, that of
the west wind drift in middle latitudes.Along this common sea road the sailors of the two different regions
would occasionally meet, thus prompting intercultural exchanges between the
Baltic lands and North Africa.

At least twice since the close of the
Stone Age, conditions have favored such events.The first occurred during the warm period of the middle Bronze
Age which was previously noted.Then
the world's climates cooled again, and the northern route to America became
too ice-bound and too dangerous to attract adventurers in those directions
any longer.It remained thus until
about AD 700, when once more the earth's climate ameliorated [see Climate] .Once again the
northern icecap melted and the polar seas could support navigation that made
use of the polar high.Once more
mariners came to northeastern America, this time under a name by which they
are known in history--The Vikings.Yet, as the inscriptions show, these Vikings were not just Norsemen,
they included as before men from the Baltic lands, Lithuanians and Latvians, as well
as Celts from Ireland and probably also Wales.After AD 1200
the earth grew colder again, the thousand vineyards of William the
Conqueror's England died out, and Normans turned their attention to the south
of Europe to bring in their Malmsey wines, no longer fermented in England,
where no vineyards now survived.The
old routs to America were deserted, and that western land lay ignored by
Europe until the voyage of Columbus once more awakened the cupidity of
monarchs who, by this time, now controlled large populations of Europe.This time the full force of European
exploitation fell upon the Amerindians, and the age of American isolation had
ended.

Another remarkable fact that now
impresses itself upon our minds is that the ancient Europeans were not
barbarians.They not only spoke in the
chief dialects of the Indo-European tongues, but already by late Neolithic
times the Europeans could write.The languages they wrote now prove to have
been comprehensible to us as representing the principal tongues of modern
Europe:Teutonic, Baltic, Celtic, and
also Basque.Yet another surprising
discovery is due to Professor Linus Brunner, who announced in 1981 the
occurrence of Semitic vocabulary in the newly identified Rhaetic language of
ancient Switzerland.

The heretofore mysterious people, to
whom the archeologists have attached such names as 'Beaker Folk,'
'Bell-beaker People,' and so on, now prove to be Europeans of our own stocks,
speaking-- and writing-- in early variant forms of languages that we can see
as related closely to the classical Teutonic, Celtic, and other tongues of
Europe at the time of the Romans.The
inscriptions found on their artifacts prove this.That it was not understood before is simply because
archeologists have mistaken the writing for decorative engraving.When a loom weight has inscribed upon it
the word warp, it is quite obvious
that this is a purely practical identification label for a weaver.Decorative it may be, but let us not
overlook the fact that such a label tells us immediately the linguistic stock
of the person who engraved it.And,
of course, it also certifies that the engraver belonged to a literate
society.

The same is true of the engravers of
the rock and cliff inscriptions of Scandinavia.When we discover that the 'meaningless' decorations beside
their ship carvings is none other than a readable comment in Baltic speech,
appropriate to the scene depicted, we know at once that the designer was
familiar with the language spoken by the ancestors of the people who still
live along the Baltic coasts today.They were, in short, Balts.Let us recognize this simple fact, and call them by their proper
names.And when we find very similar,
and similarly lettered, engravings on North American rocks, it is our
obligation to our ancestors to recognize their European origins, and to call
them by their proper names too.

Yet another of the new facts now
coming to our attention is the surprising discovery that words appropriate to
the contexts are painted or engraved beside the famous cavern paintings of
the great Aurignacian sites of Europe.These works of art have been attributed to Paleolithic people of
20,000 years ago, yet we find now that they apparently used the same words
for the animals they painted as did German and French, Spanish and Basque
speakers within historic times.When
a German of the Middle Ages called a wild bison a wisent, he was using the same word that we find written in Baltic script beside one of the most famous ancient
paintings of a bison, that on the roof of the Altamira
Cavern.

Other
paintings in other caves are similarly accompanied by ogam or Baltic script,
rendering the names of the animals in tongues of the Celtic and Basque
families.We do not find such
inscriptions beside paintings of animals that disappeared from Europe during
the last glaciation.Thus the
mammoths are not identified by name (though the Basque word that means "Bogeyman" appears beside one such mammoth
picture).This seems to mean that the
paintings were added in sequence over a long period, and only the latest of
the series carry identifications in written language.Thus, it is probably wrong to date all the
parietal art to about 20,000 BC.

In proof of the truth of this
contention may be cited the case of the Basque bone disk "coinage,"
[mentioned earlier.]This is
obviously a local Pyrenean copy, made by Basques from a silver model provided
by the Celtic coins of Aquitania in the second century before Christ.We have to correct the dating assigned by
archaeologists, for it is not 20,000 years old, but only 2,000 years of age,
and its purpose was not that of a bead or a button, but that of token
coinage.The word engraved on it is
still used in present-day Basque.

Thus, the forthcoming years will
doubtless witness more drastic pruning of the antiquity assigned to some
European works of art.They may have
been the work of Paleolithic hunters but, if so, then the Paleolithic way of
life as hunters and food-gatherers must have persisted in some parts of
Europe well into the era that is generally called late Neolithic.In the world today there are still Stone
Age peoples.So also in Europe in the
Bronze Age, 3,000 years ago, there may well have been pockets of isolated
people, living in the Paleolithic manner but acquainted with the writing
systems used by their more civilized neighbors, and applying it to the
labeling of their art work.

We have been slow to recognize the
presence of written words in the Celtic, Basque, and Teutonic tongues beside
or on these ancient cave paintings.But since we have begun to read the inscriptions, the time has come to
reconsider the role of linguists in archaeology.

Have we,
perhaps, devoted too much attention to the grammatical niceties of ancient
languages, and not enough to the daily vocabulary of the simple country
people who really constituted the bulk of the population in classical
times?Too many published papers
appear with titles like "On the Use of the Optiative Mood in Aeolic
Greek after the Time of Alcaeus."Many more papers ought to be written under headings such as "The
Vocabulary of Six Greek Graffiti from a Mycenaean Village.

Grammar without vocabulary is
useless.Vocabulary without grammar
is decidedly useful.With a slight
knowledge, and dreadful pronunciation, of Berber, Fell was able in North
Africa to elicit friendship and valuable aid during his North Africa
work.Elegant Arabic, however
literary and grammatical, would not have availed so well as a few uttered
words of Berber that Fell had recognized as belonging to the Indo-European
vocabulary of ancient Europe.The
white Berbers have no recollection of their ancestors' having come from
Europe, yet their anatomy declares them to be Europoids.Their vocabulary also yields European
roots, whereas their grammar tells us nothing about the origin of their
language.

During Norman times the English
tongue was shorn of nearly all its characteristic Teutonic grammar, and
instead a simplified Anglo-French set of grammatical rules took its
place.On the other hand, the
vocabulary retained most of the old Saxon roots, and added much French and
Latin to them.To modern students
from Asia, English seems to be (as one of them described it to me) "a
kind of French."His ideas were
based on shared vocabulary and such grammatical features as the use by modern
English of the French plural in a terminal -s, almost all the old Teutonic plurals in -n having disappeared, except in rural dialects.A farmer still makes kine the plural of cow,
but the city dweller does not.So it
is from the farmers and other village folk that we can get best information
on the older forms of European languages.

This is a general rule.When Sir henry Rawlinson set about the--
seemingly hopeless-- task of deciphering the cliff-cut cuneiform inscriptions
of Behistun [Iran], he made the basic premise that the tongue of the local
Iranian villagers might be the closest he could find to the language of the
ancient inscription cut by Darius.Jus as Champollion used Coptic to guide him into ancient Egyptian, so
also Rawlinson used the local idioms of Behistun itself.These approaches, which sound naive, are
in fact well founded on reason, and they produced results.

It is expected that a younger
generation of linguists will arise from our hidebound universities, and turn
once more, as Jakob Grimm did a century ago, to the village communities of
Europe.Let them collect the old
vocabulary and discover whatever words they can, however vulgar they may seem
to the city ear.it is from these
ancient words that we shall garner the most useful guides to the speech of
our ancestors 5,000 years ago.Much
that Julius Pokorny has done, by way of extracting the "highest common
factor" from each set of related Indo-European words, has helped in
reading the old inscriptions.He and
his predecessors and his successors, such as Linus Brunner and Imanol
Agiŕe, are worthy explorers of the tongues of our ancestors.The inscribed artifacts of Stone Age
people also bear information that has been overlooked.

It is not a random harvest, but one
already partly organized.The harvest
is ripe for the gathering, and now is the time to bring it in.